The overall rating is made up of the following evaluation criteria:
- Workmanship of the case, side panels, front panel and connectors
- Edges and corners: accident risk on opening and during installation of hardware
- Installation of mainboard and long and short expansion cards as well as various power supplies
- Cabling of the front connectors, drives, motherboards
- Installation and addition of hard drives and 5.25" drives
We Used This Hardware For The Test
We installed various hardware components in each midi tower to make the test as realistic as possible. The PC motherboard we chose was the IC7-MAX3 from Abit.
We mounted an AGP graphics card from MSI to the board, and - if the case allowed - a 2-channel ISDN adapter from Multi-Multi-Tech. While it's not the newest model anymore, we were primarily interested in seeing whether it was possible to install a long PCI card.
We used several different makes of hard drives for the test. For a 5.25" drive we chose a 16x DVD drive from MSI.
For the power supply, this time around we went with products from Tagan and FSP. Both supplies had to be easily installed separately if the case did not include a preinstalled unit.

Motherboard IC-7MAX3 from Abit as a basic platform

Older graphics card from MSI: we were mainly interested in the installation.

Long PCI cards like this 2-channel ISDN adapter are real museum pieces

A direct comparison reveals how long PCI cards used to be...
- Beauty Is In The Eye Of The Beholder
- The Test Candidates In Detail
- Little Room For Drives
- Little Room For Drives, Continued
- Codegen ATX-6089: Lightweight, And With A Handle
- Upgradeable Interior
- Coms-Com CF-707: Lightweight Model
- Enermax: Milk-White Case
- No-frills Interior
- Foxconn TH-202 Electric Blue: Hellish Encounter
- Illuminated Interior
- Jeantech JNAF600 Visco: Aluminum Case With Strange Air Filters
- The Filter System Takes Up A Lot Of Space
- Nexus Breeze: Plastic Case With Soundproofing
- Drives Under Construction
- Pros
- Kingwin Mutant X: Gamer Case With 420W PSU
- Room For 11 Drives Total
- SilverStone SST-TJ06: Totally Tubular
- Upside-down World
- Hard Drives Are Installed Vertically In The Case
- Uneec 602BLK: The Best Of Many Worlds
- Lots Of Room For Drives
- Pros
- XGBox Viper: A Case With A Bite
- Muzzle For The Back
- Bright Red Paint Job Inside And Out
- Evaluation
- Features Table
- Features Table, Continued
- Features Table, Continued
- Test Procedure
- We Used This Hardware For The Test, Continued