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Treasures or Trash, 5 PC Cases for Gamers
An anonymous reader writes "Tom's Hardware has a look at 5 different customized PC cases and a few peripheral devices that may be of some interest to gamers. From the article: 'Those who believe it is impossible to make any missteps when buying a gaming case are sadly mistaken. In most cases, you get too much plastic for your hard-earned money. Case components, covers and door panels break off far too easily, and are hard to use besides. That's why we advise savvy buyers to spend a few more dollars on their cases, and make sure they're getting quality components - especially where plastic covers or door panels are present.'"
It'd be the one I just picked up, the Antec P180. Actually I opted for the P180B, the black version (the normal 180 is silver) but either way same case, different finish. It's a case that has it all, if you asked me. It's got the setup for extremely effective cooling, yet runs very quiet for all that. Plenty of interior room, good design, etc. The only real gripe I have is it takes a long time to properly install all your components what with the special mounts and such. However, you do that once and you've got a great case.
Of course it also looks stellar. It's extremely sleek and clean the whole way around. It's the kinds of subdued good looks that make you want to leave it alone, rather than put stickers on it and rice it out.
These cases I'd liken to a riced out Civic. You are going for flash to try and distract and wow people. The P180 is more like an Audi sedan, it looks so good it needs no modification.
Either way if you are willing to spend the cash on cases like this (the $100+ market) give these overly flashy jobs a miss and have a look at a P180. It will look good in just about any room and they really put some thought in the engineering of it. It's the first case I've seen that really seemed to think someone might want to have a system that's quiet AND high performance, but not want to screw with water cooling.
Why get a Civic with a spoiler and fart pipe if you could get an S4 without for the same price?
The case absolutely does matter - but not for the reasons mentioned above (lights and looks).
It's all about the cooling - get the right fan placement and air flow in the right place and that's what matters. When you're running an AMD processor faster than a 4200 with an Nvidia 7800 SLI rig, it will matter that you have the right case to get it cool.
I was going to post the full text of the article, but there's no real point. Most of the "pages" just have three or four photos of parts of the case. The meat of the article is on page 26 for those who are actually interested. Ignore the last 2 pages, they're basically ads for "input devices that light up". Two entire PAGES with no relevance to the article topic at all. Man, what the hell happened to Tom's Hardware? You guys used to be good.
29 Pages?!?
An article like this calls for Anti-Pagination!
The antipagination plugin does help somewhat https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1539/
The fans these cases use are absurdly small (so they can be really cheap to make) and using many fans creates added noise due to the beat frequency between them.
The correct way to go about this is to get a cheap steel case, like this for $20.75
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16811156011
Then get a fan like this for $9.95
http://www.surpluscenter.com/item.asp?UID=20060529 19261386&item=16-1331&catname=electric
Now to slow the fan down, to make it quiet, wire a motor run capacitor in series with the fan. Use a cap like this ($1.99) :
http://www.surpluscenter.com/item.asp?UID=20060529 19273017&item=22-1186&catname=electric
If you use a smaller value cap, the fan will run slower. If you use a larger value cap, the fan will run faster. The fan speed changes a lot for small changes in the cap value.
Now cut a blowhole in the top of the case, bolt the fan on top blowing into the case, and get rid of all other case fans. Leave the faceplates off on both sides of the video card so lots of air rushes out that way.
Stick a fork in it. It's done.
Simply replace "index.html" with print.html. This trick works across all of Tom's sites. So, for this article it would be this link