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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.'"
They have flashy lights and windows! That's all that matters, right, guys?
29 pages? No printer-formatted single page? I'd rather not give my wrist an RSI by all that clicking or waste my allotted amount of bandwidth downloading all those ads.
my god, thats a lot of pages to scroll through... I'm inclined to be a little lazy when buying a case; I only put my feet on it so it doesn't really matter what it looks like. Inside they are all pretty much the same so long as they have enough room, and a construction which will allow you to put your feet on it safely.
I've had a friend who had a case with really bright blue lights on his computer; all that that meant was we had to stick post-it notes over them when we wanted to watch something to avoid blinding us. I wouldn't want lights on my case...
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
Those little touches are incredibly easy to do, but no one ever adds them. I'd much rather be able to swing out my power supply so I don't have to disassemble my computer to add RAM or whatnot, rather than have my case look like it's got eyes on.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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?
Drum roll please. On May 29, 2003, I entered a new phase of PC ownership. That was the day that my Chenbro SR101 21 bay server case arrived. Perhaps you didn't hear me. I said it was a 21 bay case! It's 14.5" wide and 25" tall! (The 25" includes the caster wheels.) It's a monster and unless you're one of the lucky few who own a case like this, it would most likely eat your case for an after dinner snack!
It's a masterpiece of case design! There are holders for wires in it to reduce clutter. It's like running a network inside the PC.
It has spaces for up to 15 fans.
It has caster wheels.
The motherboard is on a removable platter so I was able to just take the platter out and put the motherboard on it instead of having to put it into the case directly.
It has 12 external 5.25" bays and 8 internal 3.5" bays and 1 external 3.5" bay for the floppy drive.
The floppy drive bay has a removable platter so you can attach the drive to it and then attach the platter to the case.
The case comes with rails for the 5.25" bays. You attach the rails to each 5.25" device (CDROM, removable hard drive, etc.) and you can just slide the device into the bay and it snaps in place. You just squeeze the sides to pull them back out. There's no need to have to screw each one in and out when you want to move them around!
There's room in the back for 3 power supplies (I have 2 installed right now) and it's possible attach power supplies into the 5.25" bays if desired which theoretically means you could have 7 power supplies in it, but you wouldn't have much room left over for anything else.
The back, sides, top, and front panels are all removable, so if I want to I can remove them and have them painted or even paint them myself! (I was thinking of maybe having the entire thing painted shiny dark black with 1 big yellow pacman on each side.) I wonder if they sell spoilers for PC cases... Actually, I think I may have no choice but to add neon lights to it.
Cow Cube
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.
According to (a 30 page bonanza of mostly pictures) TFA, I own a something that could qualify as a 'gaming' case. And my vote for the "Treasures or Trash?" conundrum is: trash. Why?
LEDs on the front of the case
Yeah, they look cool. For about 5 minutes. They are dim enough not to illuminate, but bright enough to catch your eye. Hardware equivalent of a flash ad. Also, if you keep your PC in your bedroom, you'd better find something to put in front of the LEDs.
"Cheap plastic USB port covers"
Yup, cheap is right. I snapped mine off literally about half an hour before reading the article. How's that for irony? To be fair, the cover was fine until now, just a bit superfluous. I won't miss it.
Side panels
I have seen about 3 PCs in my lifetime that get sidepanels right: easy to take off, but fit snugly and stay on well in spite of semifrequent access. For my last few boxes, I hav mostly kept my sidepanel off, but laying up against the case. Well, it helps cooling...
Sliding front / moving bits
I said the cheap plastic USB port covers were superfluous? My mistake. Any moving parts such as the case front are entirely superfluous and downright annoying. My last case had a sliding front. Up, it blocked the optical drives. Down, it blocked the USB ports. Argh...
Power supplies
Gaming cases tend to get these right, assuming they include a PSU with the case. No real complaints here in my experience.
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I'd say that unless you are shallow and/or a showoff at LAN parties you'd be better off with a standard case. The money you save on the case can go on a bit of better quality RAM, or at the very worst, a round of beers. So if you have a big budget to blow on a computer you are going to be showing to a lot a people, then sure, get a cool-looking case. But make sure it's cool looking 'features' don't compromise its rather more important 'functions'.
If all you have is a grenade, pretty soon every problem looks like a foxhole -- MightyYar
29 pages for five cases? You've got to be kidding!
I hate to be the token apple fanboy, but these cases are amazingly ugly. all of them are significantly uglier than anything apple's produced, dating all the way back to the blue and white G3s.
that's not to say that OEM PC cases have to be ugly. IBM's produced some slick-looking cases, and so has Dell (for their small-form factor business stuff at least).
Lian-li's cases are also reasonably attractive, even if they somewhat appear to be knockoffs of the G5.
Industrial design seems to be an art lost to many theese days, which is a real shame... the G5's case was beautiful, functional, and able to cool several ridiculously hot G5 processors silently.
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Yeesh! Those are some fucking ugly, pre-riced cases. All they're missing is the oversized superflous fin, a coffee can-sized exhaust and gratuitous "Type R" and similar stickers, and they could be props in "The Fast and the Furious: Friday Night LAN Party."
Unless your case looks like this, I'm not going to be impressed.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
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.
Honestly.
Scenario A: Girl enters room. Standard beige box and chunky CRT are the dominant features.
Girl: In your bedroom? You've gotta be kidding. *goes home*
Gamer:
Scenario B: Girl enters room. Glowing... thingy and shiny LCD are clearly noticeable.
Girl: What are those?
Gamer: That's my flatscreen television and my mood lighting device, baby. It can cycle through very mellow sensual colours. Wanna cuddle for a bit and dream of beautiful memories... together?
Girl: Awwww.... *melts into gamers arms*
So you see, nothing at all to do with games. Beware of cases that don't do warm soft-glow red or pink though..... arctic chill blue does not incite to undress.
Attractive design holds some merit with the gaming crowd but most however don't want to lug these overdone designs around to lans. Want to sell a good gaming case? Make it small, portable, easy to work with using standard parts, and cooling a big consideration. Even if it looks somewhat bland, it will be a guaranteed sell. They will mod it.
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Needs a VTEC sticker.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
29 Pages?!?
An article like this calls for Anti-Pagination!
No, they're the same people who buy old Civics and Neons, put giant spoilers, racing stripes, and "fart can" mufflers on them because they think it makes the car go faster. These are the same people who pay extra for flashing LCD's, clear side panels and lighted fans in their cases - they think it makes it compute faster.
Let's call them "Rice Nerds."
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I am unfortunately unable to utilize any of these terrific looking cases, especially the Dragon case, as my application to become a ninja was sadly declined last week.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Too much plastic ... that about sums it up. Some came with power supplies but I'm not sure the manufacture is trustworthy, I am not familiar with the ones included. Alternatively you could get an aluminum Lian Li http://www.lian-li.com/main.htmcase like I did five years ago, it still looks like the day I bought it. I won't have to get another case unless form factor changes radically. And the big knurled nuts and sliding modular construction makes installing hard drives, power supplies or motherboards a snap. They cost a little more but they last a long time and don't break.
Many a long talk since then I have had with the man in the moon; he had my confidence on the voyage. Joshua Slocum
Oy. I'll leave the car thing alone, but as far as the computers go, most people do it because they a) like how it looks and b) enjoy doing it.
I built my cousin a computer once and he wanted to mod it out. He spent 10 hours custom carving a biohazard logo in the side of it. I think he enjoyed making little tweaks to the appearance over the next few months as much as he liked playing WoW on it once he turned it back on.
So what is wrong with that?
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.
Next time read the second page of the article. The first case reviewed has a 250mm fan on the side for cooling. It spins at 800rpm for quiet operation. The front fan is a 120mm that is also quiet, although there were no dB numbers given. The rest of the cases impede airflow with useless plastic and extra grating, but the first one was pretty good.
Your suggestion about leaving the doors off is only good for people without pets or young children. Furthermore, if the power supply is blocking the fan-propelled air from directly reaching the CPU heatsink, its possible the CPU will actually operate at a higher temperature than if the doors were on and quiet fans placed in the pre-punched case mounts.
I agree with some of what you say. Steel cases instead of cheap fragile plastic are definitely worth it. But some of the strangest things wind up being really important, such as whether the case forces you to cut your hand trying to get the power supply mounted, or inevitably drop screws in the case inextricably into weird slots while mounting things, or break badly designed feet. And it's also important to look at whether fans can be cleaned, because let's face it: many gamers are slobs and have their rooms filled with dust. Worse, many games are inclined to rest a Big Gulp on their desk where they will leave it for 3 days, half-filled, until the cheap paper cup dissolves and spills onto things, such as your suggested blowhole fan.
Cases with side fans are inevitably put in "computer desks" that have closely fitted walls that block the side fans. Front to back is the way to go for cooling, baby, with big blower fans in unused drive bays. Noise is fairly irrelevant if you're wearing good headsets with earpieces that actually cover your ears, instead of these foolish wienie headsets that try to stuff things inside your ear canal. Blocking out even hideously large case fans, and cubicle naighbors, and screaming kids nearby, with good "over-the-entire-ear" $100 headsets gives you a vastly better sound experience than even $1000 stereo systemas and sound cards.
A case that is well designed against spills on top of it is priceless. One that is well designed to allow you to reach components, and not grab a network cable inextricably into the case is also worth quite a bit. I've had the devil of a time extracting CAT5 cables from some otherwise cheap cases, and seen too many people actually set things down on top of or pour them into fans or ventholes on top of cases. And Cases with funky feet that tilt, or prevent you from setting things down safely on top of the case are merely foolish, because people will inevitabl pile them up, drop them, and wonder why their CD that's been sitting on the dirty, dusty, scratchy floor for a week with the dong walking on them don't work right.
And those stupid cases with "Exciting! Graphical! Clocks!" that have incredibly cheap built-in chips that drift a minute a day are worse than useless, they're actually worse than the "blinking 12:000" clocks that can't be set by anyone over the age of 6.
Well, I don't really know, but it may have something to do with this:
Editor In Chief and CEO of Tom's Hardware Both Step Down
IMO, tomshardware.com "jumped the shark" several years prior to this (2001?). Seemed like Tom stopped writing articles to focus on starting a corporate empire. Once all of the so called "editors" started putting their hands in the pie, the quality suffered quite a bit. Now it seems like everything on the site is targeted at the clueless newbie and paginated to maximize advertising revenue.
1. I totally agree. Chicks I know like the case, keyboard, mouse, and sound system. Not that it really matters, the right girl will like me for me anyway.
2. Funniest thing, I have the Logisys Dracula Special Edition (black with chrome trim, black handle with custom red LED button). All the fan slots are taken by red 120s and 80s. The chrome PSU (X-Connect 500 watter) had its warranty voided by some red LED fans before it was even used. I also have a pink neon (Not CCFL, Neon) in the bottom of my case. Talk about some serious mood lighting.
[Disclaimer: Yes I like my case. I did it for me and no one else. I didn't go skimpy on hardware (think Honda) either. Just because you own a Ferrari doesn't mean it wouldn't be cooler with new wheels.]
Honesty may be the best policy, but by process of elimination, dishonesty is the second best policy.
This article is lame, All hail the beige box with higher shipping and handling than price!!!!!!!!!! YAY!!!!!!!
So the Cray X1 runs Windows now? Look at the reflection on the second (or is it the third?) cabinet from the left.
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So what is wrong with that?
We simply disapprove. By our standards, your cousin is worthless.
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