PC case: buying tips and market overview with 80 models

PC case

PC case - purchase advice

In our purchase advice for PC cases you will find tips that explain everything important about the hardware home. In this way, we make it easier for you to successfully search for a suitable housing. Topics are about the size of a case and ventilation, but also a checklist with a few small things that you may not have directly on the screen. Finally, we also have a market overview with 80 cases, which, thanks to enough space inside, are also suitable for long gamer graphics cards and - apart from a few tiny cases - proper CPU cooling.

Table of contents

Page 1 PC case: case formats 1.1 PC case - purchase advice 1.1.1 Formats: room PC or mini-computer? Page 2 PC case: cooling, price-performance ratio, graphics card length 2.1 Cooling and price-performance ratio Page 3 PC case: water cooling, checklist 3.1 Water cooling: more planning required 3.1.1 Checklist before buying Page 4 PC case: market overview with 80 Case models 4.1 Market overview: 60 ATX cases 4.1.1 Market overview: 20 µATX and Mini-ITX cases Page 5 Image gallery for "PC cases: Buying tips and market overview with 80 models" Expand

Formats: Room PC or Mini calculator?

There are several standards for PC cases that allow certain conclusions to be drawn about the overall size. More precisely, these standards come about through the so-called form factors of mainboards. These are the maximum dimensions that a mainboard can have in order to still count towards a certain standard.

The most important and relevant form factors for normal users are (from small to large) Mini-ITX, µATX (also mATX or Micro-ATX), ATX and E-ATX. In order for an E-ATX mainboard to fit into a housing, it must have at least the necessary dimensions inside plus a few more centimeters for drives, power supply and cables. In general, the mainboards that have the same form factor as the housing always fit into a case, but smaller mainboards can also be installed. Of course, it does not work the other way around - an ATX mainboard does not fit into a housing that is only specified with Mini-ITX or µATX as the construction format. The resulting external dimensions can also overlap: There are ATX cases that are overall smaller than some µATX cases.

Bitfenix Enso RGB Source: Bitfenix This can happen, for example, as follows: A µATX housing offers a lot of space for drives and cooling at the front, and more space is also available at the top, for example to mount radiators for water cooling in the floor or on the ceiling of the housing. Another case may have space for ATX mainboards, but it is very compact around it and therefore overall less deep and lower than the µATX case. In general, of course, you have to decide which case size makes the most sense for you before buying. We recommend an ATX case. There are a number of models that are quite compact and hardly larger than many µATX housings. The advantage of ATX is that you have more choice of motherboards. If you want to use µATX so that the housing is as small as possible, you have to be careful not to run into problems later with regard to space and ventilation. Mini-ITX, on the other hand, should only be bought if you know how to keep gamer hardware sufficiently cooled in such a small case. Conversely, some people may be looking for a particularly large case and choose E-ATX. From our point of view, however, this is not necessary, as compact ATX cases now also enable excellent cooling thanks to modern graphics cards and CPU coolers. The times when powerful gamer hardware required an enormous amount of space so that there was enough air and fans are long gone. E-ATX is only useful for extreme situations or for PCs in which you want to install an armada of hard drives, for example, or for users who rely on a professional mainboard from the server area, which often use the E-ATX format have.