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Any Cases With Front-Facing Expansion Slots?

Posted by timothy on from the facing-forward dept.

owenferguson asks: "I'm sick and bloody tired of futzing around with ports (USB, sound, video, firewire, serial) that come out of the back of my mid-tower case. Does anyone know of a case that allows you to mount the motherboard 'backwards,' that is, with the expansion slots and various ports situated beneath the drive bays, facing foreward? I'm planning to build one myself, but if there's one already on the market, I'll probably just buy it."

3 of 50 comments (clear)

  1. Yes and no by itwerx · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Dunno 'bout cases (rather doubt there's sufficient market), but you could have an expansion chassis facing forward easily enough to get the cards around.
    Or, cheaper but more difficult (due to having to do your own cabling) you could use an external drive chassis the same way.

  2. I want one rear mount drive bay by hamjudo · · Score: 3, Insightful
    I want the CD Writer facing backwards. I don't use anything else on the front of the system. Uptimes are in the hundreds of days, I don't use the powerswitch or reset button very often. I do want access to all of the connectors and the CD Writer.

    It would be worth $20 to $30 to not need to get out the dremel and make my own rear facing drive bay.

    The other choice is externally mounting the CD-Writer. That makes the whole system more fragile. More of a pain to move and to work on. It's hard to run IDE cables externally, possible, but hard. SCSI CDWriters are either slower, more expensive or both. USB 1.1 is slower. Firewire and USB 2.0 are more expensive. Check pricewatch.com, $71 for 24x10x40x IDE, USB 1.1 is limited to 4X4X6X ($85), firewire starts at $144.

  3. Re:I got tired of this, too... by dr00g911 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Precisely my solution.

    From the early-90's beginnings of DV editing, I realized that I was going behind my workstations/beta decks/etc. at least twice a day... and up against a wall, that just lags.

    My solution was to simply face the desk outward from the wall, or (more usually) set the desk two feet from the wall to allow walking space.

    Helps a bit with heat dispersal from montiors and the like as well, FWIW.

    --dr00g