Midi Towers: You've Come a Long Way, Baby

Testing Methodology

The following criteria were applied to obtain an overall rating score:

• Case workmanship, side sections, front panel, and connections
• Edges and corners, risk of injury opening and installing hardware
• Installation of motherboard, expansion cards of varying lengths, and power supply
• Cable hook-up of frontal ports, drives , motherboard
• Installation/removal of hard drives and 5.25" drives

Hardware Used In Testing

To ensure the scoring reflects actual practice, we put a variety of different hardware components into the midi towers. The motherboard we used for the PC was the 925X-T2 LAN party from DFI.

ATX motherboard has to fit into every midi tower.

We attached an Abit PCI Express graphics card as well as an 2-channel ISDN adapter from Multi-Multi-Tech whenever the case would allow it. This card isn't the latest model any more, but we were more interested in the installability of longer PCI cards.

PCI Express graphics card from Abit

Long PCI cards do not fit into all cases

The hard drives we used were from an assortment of different manufacturers. An ASUS 52x CD ROM drive was at our disposal as a 5.25" drive.

For a power supply this time we decided to go with a model by Enermax, which features a particularly long cable strand.

Enermax power supply with long connector cables