NVIDIA Ion mini-ITX System Build Guide

Travla C287 Mini ITX Chassis

The Travla C287 (sku# CS-TE-D287) is a highly compact, lightweight aluminum alloy enclosure solution designed to conform to MiniITX form factor specifications. It also happens to look great with an anodized black finish that will look great as a HTPC. The dimensions on this case are 8.22″ (208.8 mm) x 2.87″ (72.8mm) x 9.80″ (248.8 mm) WxHxD, which is very small. The front panel even has a pair of USB 2.0 connectors and audio input/output jacks, which is always nice to have on a HTPC as you’ll likely be using a thumb drive on it. Not bad for a case that can be picked up for $111.00 plus shipping from ITXDepot.

The slim optical drive bay is a nice touch, but you don’t have to use it if you don’t want to. The Travla C287 mini-ITX chassis comes with a CompactFlash plate on it from the factory as you can see in the image above. You can purchase an optional CF reader to be used in place of the slim optical drive from ITXDepot and it only adds $25 to the cost of the case. For this build today we will be using a slot-load Blu-Ray player, so this panel will just be removed.

Rotating the Travla C287 mini-ITX chassis around to the back left side you can see that the top is held on by a single thumb screw and that the back I/O panel doesn’t come with the case. You can also see the external adapter input (power connector) for the included 60W laptop style power brick. The Travla C287 mini-ITX chassis supports the mounting of two 60mm FANs to help exhaust hot system air on the right side, but it only comes with one CeraDyna Bearing fan factory installed with a 3-pin fan header. The second fan is optional.

Looking at the other side you can see more ventilation holes, which is something the Travla C287 mini-ITX chassis has plenty of.

The feet on the bottom of the chassis are clad with nice rubber pads to prevent the surface of where the case will be from getting damaged. The front feet are also wrapped in silver, which gives the Travla C287 mini-ITX chassis the look of high-end audio equipment. The above picture also shows the power button, the blue power LED and the orange storage drive activity LED.

Taking the top access panel off, you can see the interior layout of the Travla C287 mini-ITX chassis. The little circuit board on the right side of the case is the built-in DC power board that splits the power into the cables for the motherboard and drives. When it comes to power cables the chassis includes a 20-pin ATX, 4-pin +12V, SATA and floppy power supply connector.

The tray that secures the hard drives and optical drive to the chassis features rubber isolation/vibration dampeners. This is great as it will help keep things quiet and protect the drives from slight jolts and impacts.

The Travla C287 comes with an 60W (DC 12V@5A) power brick that should be more than enough for the mini-ITX system that I plan on building for this article.

The Travla C287 Mini-ITX Chassis also comes with a users guide, SATA cables, screws, wire routing clip and the security plate. Let’s move on and take a closer look at our motherboard and then put this all together.