Keeping things quiet is important to me, so in general the weight is important, the heavier it is the quieter it is. I'm not interested in blue leds lighting up the interior or plastic panels on the side.
Mine will sit on the floor and not move for five years or so so I think I'll stick to a conventional case without a plastic panel on the side.
There are two components to the price of a case the design and the cost to build. In general the larger the number of cases of a given design the lower the design cost per case and the lower the cost of production. So I prefer as mainstream as I can get provided it meets functional requirements.
Aluminum cases are light in weight so nosier and more suited to carrying around and carry a premium price.
There is a potential fire risk with Aluminum as well. Although its generally considered fairly safe its the layer of Aluminum oxide on the outside that keeps it that way. If you want a fairly effective explosive kitchen foil dropped into liquid oxygen is very effective. Don't try this at home and keep the quantities down to a few grams inside a cast iron pipe if you do so. I've seen it demonstrated and a few square inches was enough to lift a stool placed over the top about a foot in the air.
Thanks for the suggestion though.
Cheerio John
John,
Cases were one of the things that I spent a very long time looking at. I always found some shortcomings with them when putting systems together. These problems ranged from front panels being loose and falling out to many with poor slot alignment, warpage, and hard to reach places on the inside. Among the worst things was the sharp edges on the inside. Over the years I've had quite a few battle scars from the sharp panels and interior mounting racks.
For the workstation class machine that you're looking at, try Intel or SuperMicro. They offer some really nice enclosures, but unfortunately they are way out of my budget.
My last case, which still houses my old components, is from CoolMaster. This is all fans and grill in the front. It is quite noisy though and vibrates way too much although ti was fairly easy to work on inside and kept the components quite cool.
My current case is from Corsair. This is their 800D series, which cost $300 US. There's unfortunately a clear panel on the side, which I don't care about, but the cooling is excellent. There are places to mount at the minimum 8 fans, not counting internal ones for the removable hard drives and power supply area.
The power supply is mounted on the bottom, and all wires are routed through grometted holes to keep them away from the boards and allow for good air flow.
The chassis is nearly 100% tooless, and there are no sharp edges. After spending about a day putting it together, I had no cuts in my hands, or any blood blisters from any pinch points, which was always the issue before.
Begin a solid aluminum case, there is little noise other than my hard drives crunching away, and a slight noise of the fans. The temperature of my mobo, by the way, remains at 33C even under the worst load. I haven't looked at the CPUs or the VC while running any applications, by they remain in the 45C range most of the time. This is with stock cooling and no overclocking.
The Liam Li cases the DJT mentions are okay, but I've read different reviews about them on various tech sites, and the some of the complaints about them are sharp edges on the inside. This is also the same with the new ThermalTake cases. I had looked at both of these and turned them down mainly for this reason.
Good luck on your project.
John
I opted for the stock cooler for now, and so far the system is very stable with it. Eventually I'll get one of those ThermalTake or CoolMaster turbo-type coolers. I have one of these on my older QuadCore system, and it kept the temps very low and stable even as the system got older. This older system is 4 years old, and finally developed motherboard technical difficulties. I really can't complain though because most systems don't last that long due to product life-cycles.