No, no hot glue. They're screwed to brackets. Just at odd angles. Everything has at least a centimeter of air gap. I don't know if that was the intent, but it seems like it. If you're talking the white blob next to the Cat5 cable, that's a piece of styrofoam that I dropped and didn't notice until after I'd already shot the pictures
It's not there now.
I am a bit disappointed with the power consumption, though I don't think it's out of line for the machine. They should have not advertised that without being sure. I'd be more conservative. I probably would have advertised it at 160 just to be safe. It is tunable, but at the moment at least, I'll be tuning the other way to increase the hashrate. My power is relatively cheap, and this is still about the power draw of two incandescant light bulbs. It's not a big deal on this level of machine.
On the Coincraft based ones, they'll have to do better to be competitive.
However, if what I read all over these forums is the case, and my unit is representative of AMT, then they really ought to be marketing ease of use and reliability. Granted, it hasn't had long enough to prove the latter, but it worked as intended without me doing anything aside from figuring out how to access it and put the proper settings in Cgminer. The only downtime I've had is when I turned it off or was messing with it. It's well configured. I think it should be in a bigger case, and that's really my only major critique so far. I haven't yet overclocked it or messed with the advanced settings. But AT DEFAULT, this little beast kicks ass. All things considered I think it's worth the price they're charging, and likely will be for at least a month. If they are now in position to ship them on time, the machine is good. A great many other bitfury based things seem to be awfully twitchy. This one ain't.