Originally published at: Teenage Engineering designed a PC case. It's orange. | Boing Boing
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The recent slate of Mini-ITX headlines have made me considering building a new PC with one.
My current setup has a large tower hanging off the bottom of my adjustable desk, which is a pretty good setup, honestly.
However, I really like having a bunch of USB ports & headset jack on the front of my case, and would continue housing it under the desk, whereas most Mini-ITX cases assume they’ll be on a desk (the linked A4 appears to assume top-panel venting)
Are there any recommendations for a hanging Mini-ITX case with a few front-panel ports?
retro-yet-unambigiously contemporary style you’d expect from Teenage Engineering (and is all but absent from the world of small form-factor PC cases, which generally exist on a spectrum of blandness running from “plastic LED circus” to “minimalism”)
Someone doesn’t seem to be paying much attention.
https://lazer3d.com/product/cg7-cravo/
https://nfc-systems.com/skyreach-4-mini
https://ssupd.com/products/meshlicious
https://www.coolermaster.com/catalog/cases/mini-itx/masterbox-nr200p-color/
Or you could just go on Taobao and look at the literally hundreds of ITX cases there, many of which come in interesting colors, even if the designs are often iterative or even straight copies. Is the design of this unique? Yep. Sure. Is it the only “retro yet contemporary” ITX case? Not by a long shot. And even if it was, would that make the rest of the ITX case world boring or bad? Not even close. There’s really no need to shit on things you clearly don’t know much about just to hype something you like.
As for this case, it looks … okay? The ventilation is rather worrying - I don’t understand why that side fan opening is so small (there is clearly room for a much bigger fan there, yet that looks like an 80 or 92mm fan at best, which means noise - 120 or 140mm would be far better), and the GPU clearance is poorly suited to current GPUs, as there are very few current generation GPUs that fit within 180mm/two slots. I’m also rather worried about that assembly process - hand bending 1mm aluminium ought to be fine, but there’s no way the paint won’t crack when you do this. Which will make it start peeling. Still, it looks unique, and is probably good for a midrange or lower PC, taking cooling into consideration. It’s not like anyone is able to buy a GPU anyhow.
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I don’t think there are many with more than two front USB ports. If I were you, I would just buy a hub - that way you can place it where it’s most convenient for you as well.
As for hanging cases: there aren’t many, but I’ve seen quite a few people bolt various cases to their desks - ITX builds are often light enough that you can just screw them into place through the bottom panel, where the feet typically go - but space it out a bit if you want some ventilation, of course.
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mildly refreshing to see a case that didn’t have more LED lighting inside it than my house does on the outside of it, and a case that barely passes FCC rules for EMI.
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I guess they don’t use hard drives? At least I don’t see any mention of 3.5" anything.
Besides I wanted ITX, but needed a place to put drives to basically make a NAS box. So I went with the Node 304. But coming from the land of a full size ATX chassis I still wanted good cooling, so I shoved a Noctua NH-C14S into it.
Exceedingly few people have 3.5" HDDs in their PCs today - the need has simply passed. Most people no longer have multi-TB media libraries (thanks to the advent of streaming), and those who do are moving to NAS solutions instead. My NAS does indeed live in a Node 304, but as it’s a low power machine I don’t need your crazy cooling 
And it sits in a closet, so the case doesn’t matter beyond fitting the required hardware Kind of odd restricting yourself to two HDDs with that cooler though! There are definitely small ITX cases that can fit two 3.5" HDDs and do it better than that (the Meshlicious and NR200 (which also comes in non-obnoxious colours if that’s more your style) both fit two 3.5" HDDs (plus a selection of 2.5" drives if you want those). Both of those can do pretty beefy CPU cooling too!
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Can confirm. Is orange.
While it looks nice, I’m not the type of user for this case, don’t need my PC sticking out like a sore thumb.
I love the idea of a tiny case, but my current full sized case is completely rammed with water-cooling and harddrives.
So, I have a cunning plan, to move the harddrives into their own NAS, and to create an enclosure to hold all the watercooling gubbins, with some of the quick-release hose connectors connecting it to the actual hardware in a tiny case.
My main system cools an AMD 5800X and 6900 XT with a custom water loop in an SSUPD Meshlicious - a bit larger than this at 15l, but not much. I have undervolted the GPU and CPU a bit to keep thermals in check, but it’s still perfectly doable with a single 280mm radiator. Liquid temperatures can exceed 40 degrees at times, but that’s only under sustained CPU+GPU loads - and it’s dead quiet at full bore. And there are of course plenty of cases that can fit two 240-280mm rads if you want more capacity, like the Ncase M1 (sadly discontinued), Cooler Master NR200 Max, and more. There are very, very few real performance compromises needed for SFF these days - you just have to know what options exist. External water cooling is absolutely an option, but it’s very rarely necessary.
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