New Generation of Cases?

mikeb55121 writes "In my never ending quest to build a bigger and better computer i have come across this new design of computer case that is prety intresting to me and possibly any one else out there who build their own computers. This case is very unique because it is shaped as a "T" and the manufacture says that it ends cable clutter and has very good airflow." The aesthetics aren't bad, and the concept is solid. It'll be interesting to see if this catches on. I kind of doubt it.

Comments

An old lesson from Apple

[browser_war_pow]

I just had to cart a PC up 3 flights of stairs and down the hall to my dorm room. Moving my PowerMac was a lot easier because of the handles. PC makers still have a lot to learn from Apple IMO

Re:An old lesson from Apple

[sql*kitten]

I just had to cart a PC up 3 flights of stairs and down the hall to my dorm room. Moving my PowerMac was a lot easier because of the handles. PC makers still have a lot to learn from Apple IMO

If you can afford both a Mac and PC, surely you can afford a butler to do all that lifting and carrying for you?

Re:An old lesson from Apple

[shepd]

>PC makers still have a lot to learn from Apple IMO

You mean Apple learned from PC makers, right? Apples loves to bring back really OLD ideas and pretend they're new and cool...

Re:An old lesson from Apple

[Rolo Tomasi]

[...] those steel cases are [...] less able to radiate excess heat.

A commonly held misconception. The truth is, however, that unless the hot components are in direct contact with the aluminum, the air will act as a thermal insulator, and given the fact that air is one of the best thermal insulators out there, the cooling advantage over a steel case is somewhere between jack and shit.

Re:An old lesson from Apple

[dissy]

Even not looking at the speed of things, firewire is a much better protocol than USB.

Firewire is pretty close to SCSI when it comes to its protocols, where as USB is best compared to RS-422.

With USB there is a host (computer) and devices (everything else)

With firewire, everything is a device, and they can all talk to eachother.

If USB HD 1 wants to send data to USB HD 2, the host computer must read one drive and write to the other. There is no other way.

With firewire, *A* computer (Yes there can be more than one on the bus) can instruct HD 1 to send data to HD 2 in large chunks, so there is very little overhead going through the computer.

Two firewire drives will be able to have the full 400mbit between them, where as two USB2 drives will only beable to send at a theoretical speed of 240mbit/sec because half of its 480mbit bandwidth is from one drive to the PC, then the other half is from the pc to the other drive.

Also having say 5 PCs and a number of firewire devices (generally not harddrives as they are a special case) each PC will see the same hardware and they can all use it in a shared fasion.
The PCs also can run IP over firewire and use it for networking as well.
harddrives will be seen by all the machines as well, its just typical computers assume a disk will be seen by itself only, so do not plan ahead for what to do when that data is changed unexpectantly.

None of that is possible with USB, and without special hardware you cant attach two or more PCs with USB (no a hub is not special) as each computer needs an adaptor to make it a 'device' instead of a 'host', and then the device computers cant see the rest of the USB chain.

USB was designed and made to replace serial.
Firewire was designed and made to be generic and have anything/everything run over it, including IP, video signal, serial, disk protocols, etc.

If you only need basic serial operation and very little over head, yes USB may be concidered better. But thats the only case it would be true.

Re:An old lesson from Apple

[Rolo Tomasi]

Forgive me if I'm missing something here, but the entire case is aluminum (Lian Li PC-68), inside and out. Everything is connected to part of that case and thus to the aluminum.

So your CPU, your graphics chip and all the chips on your mainboard are in full contact with your case, with no air in between, i.e. using thermal grease? Uhh huh, yup ... must have been one hell of a soldering job, connecting microscopic wires to all those 500+-ball BGAs ...

It also has three fans plus the one on the power supply. Now you're going to tell me fans are a misconception too?

Take some reading lessons. I didn't say that. Or are you trying to divert attention by making ridiculous comparisons on purpose?

Say what? Air is an electrical insulator, and only to relatively low voltages. Vide, e.g., lightning.

What are you, some kind of troll? Nobody was talking about electrical conductivity. But since you brought this up, it shows your lack of general knowledge. Relatively low voltages, yeah, about 25 kV/cm. Air is coincidentally also one of the best electrical insulators.

It is most assuredly not a thermal insulator. Put your hand near a cold window in Winter and see how much insulation you get.

Ok, you're definitely a troll. A simple experiment: put your hand in 212 degree hot air. Then put your hand in 212 degree hot (i.e. boiling) water. After that, hold a 212 degree hot metal bar in your hand. Then tell me which material has better thermal conductivity.

Re:An old lesson from Apple

[HardCase]

"Say what? Air is an electrical insulator, and only to relatively low voltages. Vide, e.g., lightning. It is most assuredly not a thermal insulator. Put your hand near a cold window in Winter and see how much insulation you get."
...

"If it's an insulator, why does it get hot?"
...

"The fact is that trapped air is a good insulator relative to flowing air and to solid objects like lumber."

Good grief, make up your mind! The fact is that air is a very good thermal insulator, one of the best, because, like almost all gases, it has a very low coefficient of thermal inertia. That means that for a given volume of air, it will conduct less heat (energy) over a given period of time. One of the reasons is that the molecules of air are less dense than, say, a given volume of steel.

Why does the air get hot? Simple...you've got a limited volume inside the case and a number of components that are emitting a (relatively) stupendous amount of heat. The small volume of air in the case will most definitely heat up.

Although the fans in the aluminum case will transfer some small amount of the heat to the case, you'll actually find that because the coefficients of thermal inertia are so mismatched between air and metal that very little thermal transfer is taking place between, say, the CPU and the case. That's because the metal can conduct the heat much faster than the air can deliver it.

The real problem is getting the hot air inside the case out of the case. I design memory modules, and part of the work is doing thermal analyses of them. Our models (which reflect reality pretty closely) show that the material of the case is not particularly important when it comes to managing thermal issues within the case. What is far more important is getting the hot air out of the case as quickly as possible...and that's because the air itself simply will not conduct the heat to another location effectively. Why? Because it's an insulator!

Incidentally, air is quite a good electrical insulator, too, unless it is ionized by a fairly high voltage.

"Why is there always somebody who has to argue with the obvious?"

Indeed!

-h-

noise

[smokin_juan]

blah. it's all lights and cooling and cable clutter and poppy cock. let me know when they design a QUIET computer case. noise cancelation tech, built in sound dampening materials, baffles on the outside fans... hell i dunno, but my heap is LOUD and i'm doubting that a "T" does much for noise.

Re:noise

[jcoy42]

Go do your research. There is quite a bit of information on quieting your PC out there, and quite a bit of specialized hardware out there to do this.

Go to google and search for "quiet PC" or click here.

There are plenty of cases/fans/and everything else out there to silence a PC. You just have to look.

Re:noise

[arivanov]

This one will be quieter then the usual. Smaller and less powerful fans becayue there is less cable clutter and less resistance to air. At the end it will depend what fans it uses but it has a better chance to be quiet then a normal spagetty case,

Wow, no pictures.

[foolip]

For those of you who don't much like macromedia stuff, you can see small pictures of these things on another page on the same site.

Nice idea, but...

[loply]

For reference, you can buy the cases from Ebuyer.co.uk for £80, and they are both deeper and wider than most ATX cases (thus, less space efficient).

They will not fit into the "case" compartment of most PC benches, if thats the kind you have.

Good idea, but Im pretty sure theyre a passing fad since the dimensions are so inefficient.

Huh?

[Idarubicin]

The aesthetics aren't bad, and the concept is solid. It'll be interesting to see if this catches on. I kind of doubt it.

Well, that's pessimistic. "It's good, but nobody will buy it."

If the airflow is as good as they claim, then that's excellent. I've had a number of problems over the years with poor cooling, and I'm certainly not a hardcore gamer or 3D renderer.

Easy access to everything in the case is also a big plus. It just looks so elegant. No more fumbling with lots of little screws and trying to get Tab A into Slot B reassembling my case.

There are a few potential problems: the manufacture of this case will be more costly--it's not just a box. So bargain hunters won't buy it. The shape of the case won't fit into a narrow slot that some desks leave; it wouldn't be a problem at my desk, but I can see trouble in cramped environments. Aesthetically, the shape is novel, but I don't know if it's as attractive as the poster makes out. Finally, are drive cables long enough to reach all the drive bays, or are we limited to technologies that permit longer cable runs (serial ATA, for example)?

My two cents.

not new: Apple, Compaq, IBM

[axxackall]

The way to open/close the case is like G3/4 Towers do.

Some similar ideas I remember from my experience also with Compaq and IBM.

About time

[TerryAtWork]

I've opened many a case in my time and I figure some of these case designers missed their calling, which was to design traps that guard Pharaoh's tombs.

Fast Mirror

[gulfan]

Here's a fast mirror incase the website goes down.

one perfect shape

[g4dget]

Oh, come on, everybody knows that the one perfect shape for a PC case is this.

Besides, it goes so well with the one perfect shape for furniture.

Excellent Coolermaster Case

[Jubii]

This case would look at home in any AV setup.

Cooler Master 610-GX1

A bit pricey though

A few more pictures.

Two Observations

[idiotnot]

1. The cooling for the drives looks to be less-than-optimal. I tend to run SCSI drives in my systems, and many of them get hot. The intake for the fans would also pull air right off my nice cool 19" monitor, seeing as how my monitor is to the right of the tower.

2. There's a reason cables come out of the *back* of a computer -- you can route them to wherever you want them. Looking at this case, all the cables come out of the left side of the case. Looking at my desk, my tower is on the left side (which is by the wall). So with this, I'd have to route the cables *around* the back of the case....

Ob/.CaseMod: Where would you put the window and the neon lights?

Re:Two Observations

[ctr2sprt]

Ob/.CaseMod: Where would you put the window and the neon lights?

In the trash, where they belong.

(I have too much karma!)

This reminds me of the crappy CompUSA case..

[SensitiveMale]

that has the motherboard mounted on a fold down door.

While it looked cool and functional on my mac the PC case sucked because the IDE and floppy cables were too short to reach when the door was all the way open.

So every time I had to open the case i had to disconnect my hard drives and floppy.

Just another instance of the PC makers half-ass following Apple's lead and getting it all wrong.

I'm cluster biased

[AssFace]

People are saying that it won't fit in the slots of their desks... I suppose I'm not the typical user - I would never ever ever ever ever ever get a desk that had a slot for me to put my computer in.
It insulates the machine too much and regardless of how hard you work to cool it, you are exacerbating the issue if you have it in a slot in your desk.

That said, I'm not sure the shape is all that great for my uses because I basically only ever really want either a laptop, or a bunch of small and compact machines to cluster. Something that shape on its own and under an open desk is just dandy - but trying to put that in an area with others just like it takes up more space than just the traditional "brick o' computer"

The main things I want from a case are compactness,quietness, and cheapness.
None of those seem to help keep it cool, but when you have multiple white noise sources going, they seem to amplify each other, and it SUCKS on hardwood floors.

I want a case that is quiet and clamshells, but is just a normal shape that is easy to cram a bunch of them in a small place.
basically I want a rackmount, but for way less money :)

OT: Thermal management: PC design sucks...

[wowbagger]

The design of the PC system SUCKS from a thermal management standpoint.

Look at the old VME systems (e.g. what is in use at a telephone switching office).

The backplane board is vertically mounted along the back of the enclosure, and the cards are ALSO vertically mounted into the backplane. Any plugs on each card are on the front of the card. One whole section of the bus is reserved for I/O connections, so standard connections are on the backplane.

As a result, natural convection can move air over the system. If you need forced air, you put a fan at the bottom of the system, pressurizing the cabinet - that way you are moving denser, cold air with the fan.

When the S100 systems came out, they almost got this right, but they put the backplane on the bottom, and mounted the cards vertically. As a result, you now have the backplane blocking natural convection. Plus, with the connectors on the BACK of the card, you have yet another impediment to air flow.

When the first PC was designed, they stole the design of the S100 bus systems in that regard.

Now, you have one of two options - the tower approach, with the main board vertical and the cards horizontal - so your GPU cooks in its own heat, and the cards block the natural airflow over the main board, or the desktop approach - where your cards are vertical, but your main board cooks.

All case designs for the PC are work-arounds for this rather BAD design.

And until the PC industry starts making a change, no case tricks will completely ease this.

That said, I must say these things:

1) That was possibly the BEST use of a Flash animation for a site I've seen in a long time. Rather than wasting my time with BS, they show me the case in operation. Bravo to the webmaster!

2) The case actually would solve one problem I have in my setup - with all the cables exiting out the back of the tower case, and the tower being in the bay in my desk, it is a bitch to get to them, and they tend to get nibbled on by the fans I've put at the back of the desk. This case, with the cards exiting from the side would avoid that.