Antec Veris Multimedia Station Premier
Installation
Installing the Multimedia Station should have been easy: ‘should’ being the operative word. Unfortunately the chassis which currently houses my pc has small air intakes between each 5 1/2″ drive bay, making it impossible to slide in the double height Multimedia station. This is something you will need to bear in mind before you buy – check to make sure you have a case with 5 1/2″ bays directly next to eachother, with no gap in-between.
The first stage of installation involves installing the 24pin pass through. This cable allows the Multimedia Station to draw off the PSU’s 5v stand by power rail, in turn allowing it to display the time even when the pc is turned off. You need to install the pass through between your PSU and Motherboard, then run the group of three wires to the drive bay and put the plug into the socket located on the small PCB (Left Picture).
The next step is to wire up the USB so that the Multimedia Station can communicate with your computer. There are two ways of doing this; you can either run the USB lead out the back of your case and into a standard USB port, or use the included adaptor to connect directly with a motherboard header. The power switch will also need to be wired into the device, which will allow you to boot your computer via the included remote. To do this you wire your case’s current power switch into the Multimedia Station’s PCB, then take the new power switch lead from the PCB to your motherboard – Voilà, hardware installation is complete.
Once the hardware side of the installation is out of the way, you will need to boot up your pc and begin the software installation. Installation is fairly quick, and after a restart you are ready to go. Before going into the media handling side of things, you will need to setup the display. This involves selecting which remote you will be using, what you want the display to show and setting up RSS feeds and Email accounts. All of this is fairly self explanatory, but can be a bit daunting with the wealth of options. Once you get to grips with what each button does though, it doesn’t take long to setup.
Before looking further at the media side of things, I thought I would take a look at what sort of system information the display can handle. I was expecting something similar to Logitech G15, displaying ram usage, maybe a temperature or two and CPU usage. I was wrong; instead it just scrolls through your system specs, with things like “Windows Vista Home Premium” and “Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600”. Not willing to give up, I fired up Everest as this worked incredibly well with my G15, but alas, it wasn’t compatible with the display. For the enthusiasts out there, I’m sure someone will find a way of doing it, but until then, looking at detailed system information is off the cards.
Here are some shots of the Multimedia Display showing various bits of information.
Time – System Information
System Information – iTunes
Having looked at the device up close, it’s about time we had a look at the bundled software. Head on over to the next page where I take a look at the iMon software.
