Riotoro CR280 Mini ITX Case Review

great price, but I wish some more case manufacturers would build some higher end ITX cases that are actually this compact. Lian Li seems like the best bet, but I'm not interested in spending 2-300 on a case

I mean, this is great value, and it's a good starting point for getting into small form factor builds. You're also right that going much smaller is going to require a more optimized layout, though that's really not a drawback aside from perhaps being slightly trickier to build in the first time.

However, do bear in mind that when talking about SFF as an enthusiast niche, this case really isn't that small - 320mm x 203mm x 330mm works out to 21.5 liters. The widely available Silverstone Raven is just 14 liters, and there are specialty cases which use completely off-the-shelf parts to build gaming computers in a half to a third of this case. Heck, the S4 mini comes with a custom power supply, can fit up to an itx gtx 1080, and is less than a quarter of the volume of this case.

I mean, there are people designing cases to fit full ATX computers into ~23 liters.

I've said things like this before and gotten lukewarm responses, so let me just qualify this: Yes, those are pricy solutions, and yes, it's very niche... But someone interested in a case like this, who hasn't yet found the world of SFF computing, deserves to know about it. Surely it can't hurt to add two sentences to your article saying, "I know this case is tiny compared to a regular ITX chassis, but coming at it from the other perspective, 21.5 liters makes this a somewhat sizeable case for those niche enthusiasts who are into SFF computing."

(That's another thing I'd love to see; the dimensions are a start, but giving the volume in the stats would be super nice when talking about ITX cases. It's an easy calculation, and google will do it for you if you just type in the dimensions in mm multiplied by each other.)

20009227 said:

(That's another thing I'd love to see; the dimensions are a start, but giving the volume in the stats would be super nice when talking about ITX cases. It's an easy calculation, and google will do it for you if you just type in the dimensions in mm multiplied by each other.)

For that to be most effective, one has to use internal measurements and not external, which is a little harder to find.

One positive about the "paper wrap" for a color filter on the LEDs. If you don't want red, you can change it easy enough. the red strip around the front of the case is a different matter, but if you can live with that and different colors for the LEDs...