Why 8 New Miditower Cases Do Not Always Deliver
Testing
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 the motherboard and expansion cards, along with various power supplies and drives
- Cabling of the front connectors, drives, motherboards
- Expansion of hard drives and 5.25" drives
- Functions of the display, reading the values, handling
Hardware Used For Testing
To make the rating realistic, various hardware components were installed in the miditowers in question. The IC7-MAX3 from Abit served as a motherboard for the PC. An AGP-graphics card from MSI was fastened to it and - if the case allowed it - a 4-channel controller from Advansys. Although this card is not the latest model, the issue was whether or not a long PCI card could be installed. The hard drives used were a selection from diverse manufacturers. For a 5.25" drive, we had a 16x DVD drive from MSI on hand. For power supplies, we picked a Superflower model (integrated 140 mm fan) and a fanless power supply from Yesico. It was necessary for both power supplies to be installed separately without problem.
IC-7MAX3 motherboard from Abit as platform
Older graphics card from MSI: Here, all we had to do was install the card.
Advansys 4-channel RAID controller: Long cards should fit
Each case should be able to handle four 3.5" hard drives
Power supply from Superflower with extra-large 140 mm fan
Fanless power supplies are gaining in popularity because they don't make any noise
Stay on the Cutting Edge
Join the experts who read Tom's Hardware for the inside track on enthusiast PC tech news — and have for over 25 years. We'll send breaking news and in-depth reviews of CPUs, GPUs, AI, maker hardware and more straight to your inbox.