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I'll start by showing you my daily-driver's case. Yup; that's the biggest, baddest, beast of 4-5 years ago; the Cooler Master Cosmos II. It will take an EATX sized motherboard and has room for something like 14 drives. It weighs about 60lbs...empty. The fact is; I love cases. All different kinds of cases. Like some people love cars, women, wine, guns, whatever. I love computer cases. I think they're interesting and sometimes beautiful. The Cosmos is a case-in-point... sorry, couldn't help myself. I've kept it at bay for some time after getting the Cosmos, but there are certain ones out there that punch my buttons!
This is one of them! The Corsair Graphite 380T. I've loved it since the first time I saw it. The only thing I didn't love about it was the $140 price. I love that it looks like an Igloo cooler...
I love that it's kinda oversized for a Mini-ITX case! Shouldn't be a surprise coming from somebody who uses a Cosmos.... right?
It can hold 2, 3.5" drives, and 2, 2.5" ones as well. There's space for 2, 120mm, 1, 140mm or 1 200mm fan in the front of the unit. It'll take a 240mm double water-cooler on one side and a 120mm one n the back. The graphics card can be up to 290mm. So, I forgive that it's a little chunky. As you can see; both side and the front pop off. It's just unique, and I love that I bought it for $50 on Craigslist! I don't have any idea what I'm going to build into this thing yet.
While, I'm in the process of baring by soul on this topic, I'll just throw out there that there's another case that I'd buy on sight. That's the Cooler Master XB/XB Evo, from their "HAF" (high air flow) line.
Yes, it's a little unusual as well. It's a cube style case that can be used as an open, test-bench with the side and top removed! I'd buy this one in a heartbeat as well if I came across one around $50! Are there any others that causes my addiction shakes to come on?
The Thermaltake V1 (Mini-ITX) and V21 (Micro-ATX) cases. I like cubes, especially ones that can be configured and reconfigured any way you want.
Fractal Design Node 804 (Micro-ATX), and 304 (Mini-ITX). Getting the impression I really like cubes? They're space efficient. Just look at the 3 (!) drive carriers that can each hold 2, 3.5" HDDs! Can we say, home server!?!
The Silverstone ML-08B-H; Mini-ITX why wouldn't you love it. It has a handle..... !
.....and the Thermaltake DH-202 HTPC case with a 7" touch display for obvious reasons. Oh, there are way more. Some for their build quality, others for their exquisite materials and even some just because they're interesting, but I'd better quit before I get carried away!
The home theater PC (HTPC) in my main A/V system is built in an Ahanix D-Vine case. Originally, it had some pretty pedestrian parts in it although the bones were good. Over time though, it got the Intel E8400 "Wolfdale" CPU processor from the original Blackbird, along with 8Gb of RAM, and it was decently powerful for what it was asked to do. Much like Japanese car manufacturers, I like to do a mid-generation facelift before any major rebuild. And as the small HTPC is already on "2nd Gen Core" platform and now the main workstation is on an "Ivy Bridge" i5, changes need to be made to this old girl.
Originally, my only idea was to upgrade it's small 64Gb Mushkin Callista SSD to something bigger. It was going to be part of the "cascade", taking the 128Gb Samsung from the interim workstation build, but I came upon this 120Gb, OCZ Vertex 2 a few weeks ago. And since this SSD was an odd 3.5", vs. the normal 2.5", it couldn't ever go into a notebook, so into the HTPC it went.
The other change ended up being this: a 500Gb/7200rpm Hitachi 5K drive which replaced the 500Gb/7200rpm, Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 that was in there. You might be asking yourself, why did he do that? Well, other than my long-running bias against Seagate drives, that particular Seagate is PATA. And with my FreeNAS box having a Promise dual IDE controller and only 3 drives to fill it out.....I needed/wanted a fourth PATA drive to fill it out. So I picked up a used 500Gb SATA drive to go into the HTPC and moved it's old drive.
And of course, with the new drives, comes a new load for Window. As much of a pain in the behind that it is, there's nothing like a fresh Windows load to make a machine run fast. Although this little side-trek didn't take any parts from the Blackbird rebuild directly, it was effected by it peripherally. What happened to the old 64Gb Mushkin SSD? It went into a client machine and therefore fulfilled a purpose as well as defrayed the cost of the upgrade. I charged the buyer $50 to upgrade to the SSD from a mechanical drive, and the 120Gb OCZ SSD cost me $60. So I guess upgrade that doubled the size of my boot drive costs me $10 and some time to reload the OS.
Anything else come out of this little upgrade? Well.....now that you mention it..... While I was researching, I came across this Thermaltake DH-202 HTPC case. I've always found the D-Vine a little lacking in front-panel access and info, and this case has not only lots of controls, but also a 7" display so if I'm just doing something; say doing Windows updates, I can do it right from the machine vs. having to turn on the whole rig. Or if I'm just trying to stream some music from the server. Just sayin'.......
