Contour Enthusiasts Group Archives Forums General Common Interests Computer case!

my current computer case

http://www.koolance.com/shop/product_info.php?cPath=38&products_id=151
- love the watercooling but...

- its a ginormous 30lbs without anything in it, and as much as mine travels to the fun of lan parties... its a pain.

New one i'm lookin at buying.


Still watercooled, and from the same company... and its only 13lbs!!!! Also they have done smart things like put the water resivior on the top of the case, unlike mine thats on the bottom... nothin like pouring water and coolent into your case while trying to balance it....lol.

Thats what i have found that was decent.. but for $300 its a bit pricey, i think i found it for $250 at the lowest. And that is not including the extra $50 for the cpu cooling block... and more for the optional northbridge cooler, HDD cooler, and GPU cooler.(which would be going a bit extreme in my part) Anyone else know of any decent aluminimum cases worth buying that arnt ugly as hell.

If you go to LAN parties a lot why not just get one of those shuttle jobs that are MUCH smaller and lighter. Sure you will sacrifice a few FPS, but if you take it with you a lot it is worth it.

Personally I wouldn't buy an aluminum case, I haven't found one where the metal was thick enough for my liking.

My friend bought a small shuttle case... its kinda like an elongated cube and has had nothing but problems with it... both the power and reset button broke off within a week, the only processor cooler he could fit in it was the stock intel cooler because there was very little room(and because of the socket 778) The case was so small that the ambient temp of the case sits at above 55 celcius, and his motherboard died after a month and it took the shuttle 6 weeks to return it to him... so that has steered me away from that option.

The cases are just to small to allow airflow through the computer unless you start cutting the case and putting some 80mm case fans in it or something like that. And you become severly limited on what prehiperals you can put in the case... for example the leadtec 6600gt is a small size card and it barley fits in the case. My huge MSI 5900 is over half the length of the case.

I agree that the aluminum cases are cheaply built, but i am really conserned with the weight of the case. some of the steel mid towers are light too... i just havent found one that i like, they all have some stupid plastic on the front that make them look like transformers or something.

get an antec, I love them. If you can live with a Micro ATX format MoBo, get the Antec Aria, it's tiny.

My case is an older version of the first one pictured... only it's black, has no window and no water-cooling. I took it to a LAN party once... what a pain. It had a dual-P3 motherboard in it with two ThermalTake Dragon-Orb coolers, 2 harddrives, 3 CD drives (1 CDROM,1 SCSI CDRW, 1 DVD). Plus the usual assortment of cards before everything went 'onboard' and a bunch of fans. HEAVY!
But I have yet to find a case that I really NEED to upgrade to (or that I like much more). I call it the wind tunnel.

Here's an old pic:
I had replaced the SCSI drive (seemed like 1/3 the weight) and card with an ATAPI burner.



Not the best box for LAN partying!

Just go with the Lian Li. Much better than Antec or Thermaltake or anything similar IMO.

They are better quality, very light and with the tests I've done, system temperatures run the coolest in them. They have the best airflow and heat is dissipated the best through the aluminum.

Also, Lian Li has something that alot of other cases don't have, a slide out motherboard tray. This makes working inside the case 1000 times easier than others.

I have a knock off of the Lian Li shown above. I got mine for 41 with shipping. Its alunium and the box it was shipped in said 9lbs. So its considerbly less weight, its black and almost idenitical design, except mine has a design and a fan in the side window. Other then that looks identical, and thats why i bought this one.

That second koolance case i put up there is a lan li case with the koolance equipment integrated into it. I like the way the case looks, and i love the watercooling. With my old case my cpu sits at 17 celcius, and under full load for hours it gets up to 30 celcius at the max.