MINI-ITX and the Future of PC Case Design?

An anonymous reader writes "One of the interesting things to come out of the recent Computex electronics show in Taiwan was striking new PC cases — in particular systems built around tiny Mini-ITX boards. What may have once been regarded as the weird little brother of the more common Micro-ATX, the popularity of PCs built with these boards seems to be gradually building. This year at Computex saw the first Mini-ITX boards to support USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps, and a variety of new shapes and styles in both Micro-ATX and Mini-ITX case design. This photo gallery shows some of the more striking examples of these new PC cases from Computex, including one that appears to be modelled on an Xbox 360, and one with a VESA mount for strapping to the back of a monitor. Interestingly, while these designs have usually been associated with home theatre system PCs, or for saving space on office desktops, there is also now a trend towards pushing 'gamer' features like windows and multiple fans into these small form factor cases."

Comments

Re:optical illusion

[KlaymenDK]

Yeah, I was paging through that slide show thinking "hideous, hideous, also hideous ... and hideous." Are these the more notable ones because they're fugly, or is that just the state of the art?
I mean, individuals can make cases that are so much more attractive ... such as the "Deco Box" or the "Rundfunker", or even toaster fer cryin' out loud!
http://mini-itx.com/projects/decobox/
http://mini-itx.com/projects/rundfunker/
http://mini-itx.com/projects/toasterpc/page3.asp

I was looking for a case for an htpc recently, and the only useful case I could find that didn't come with un-covered front (usb, fiwi, headphone) ports was a Silverstone LASCALA LC16M. Seriously, one case?

Re:1 Step Closer...

[IndustrialComplex]

Well, I can dream anyway...

5 years ago I had the idea to build a briefcase sized laptop. I was going for style over performance, and changed my design half-way through due to the expense (I was just out of college and still on ramen budgets) so I didn't invest in a laptop LCD. However, I kept the laptop formfactor for my internal components. Here is what I did:

Using only non-laptop components. I found a very slim power supply that was typically designed for a 1U rack. This ran alongside the motherboard and was about as tall as the entire board (PCB+RAM height) I used a board that had built in video,ethernet,sound so I wouldn't have to have any vertical PCI cards. Since I didn't have to use the PCI ports, I placed the HDD over this location and it rested on the plastic risers (Top of the HDD on the plastic) I couldn't do much about the RAM but it didn't stick up above the capacitors very much. I used a processor heatsink with a fan since this would let me get away with a smaller heatsink, though the processor in the board would probably run with just a basic heatsink and no fan. I used a standard 5.25" DVD drive which sat next to the power supply and next to the motherboard.

I took two aluminum sheets and drilled holes to attach the motherboard to the bottom sheet, and the HDD, DVD, and Powersupply were attached to the upper sheet. They were then sandwiched together and I used short bolts to hold the two halves together.

The result was something on the order of 12" x 12" x 1.75" (can't remember the exact dimensions). Due to the way the components were sandwiched, it was fairly robust and I was able to mount it with shock absorbers inside a travel case.

Later when I had more cash, I built it into an ammo-can and included a fold-out monitor and keyboard/touchpad. It turned into an AMAZING little portable server for things like LAN parties.

With it's 1'x1'x1.75" dimensions, I'm sure that I could have easily put it inside a briefcase and built in a display. I just went with the ammo-can because having a truly rugged portable computer was useful to me. (in addition to being waterproof)

With today's boards and SSD storage It would probably be no trouble at all.