What size is right for YOU??

we uh don't typically do case reviews around here at least we hadn't for quite a while and then we started doing case reviews again and they were actually pretty popular and i started wondering why that was and i think it's because a lot of people right now while they can't necessarily maybe upgrade their graphics card and stuff like they would like to do availability cases are still available they're not really marked up and it's kind of the quickest way to prepare for future upgrades but also just change the feel and look of your computer so i decided that today i would go ahead and do kind of a case overview of the different form factors and if you're considering upgrading your system what to look for and what to make sure you don't fall victim of when it comes to different cases and stuff so let's talk about that today we interrupt this video to bring you a special message from ifixit no we interrupt this interruption with this interruption about new stuff from my victims pushing him grab his card but inventory sucks fix the inventory problems with ifixit whoa don't drop it can't fix that without fixing just kidding yes you can wish you could take ifixit with you anywhere but your pockets aren't big enough introducing you more and the new nino take them with you anywhere so can i fix it for your loved ones or just get them for yourself [Applause] if i was doing this video six seven years ago it'd be pretty easy because most cases were rectangles like what you see on the desk right here or on the table but form factors have really started changing you've got dual chamber form factors and then you've got dual chamber in each of the form factors that we have kind of on the table here so we're going to keep things basic and still discuss it as if it were a rectangle because that's still the prominent like shape that you're going to find on the market but there are caveats and exceptions to everything we're going to talk about today so i want to put that out there first and foremost but the three main categories you'll find of cases without going into those crazy subcategories is mini itx and and you're going to find that the case form factor specifically is referring to the motherboard size that's guaranteed to fit in there but anyway mini itx mid tower and super tower so each one of these like i said have kind of a tree underneath them of different subcategories and the design sort of tweaks and changes but we're going to talk about the main header right then and there and we'll kick things off with mini itx because the popularity of mini itx is really going up so this is my fractal design uh defined nano s i built this back in 2016. it's about six years old now um this was kind of when itx was really starting to take off again or itx form factors and i did a build on this you guys want to look it up you can um the glass tubing and everything that's in here it's a very old system i want to say it's a 6700 no 6700k yeah i think it's a 6700k i can't remember to give you an idea of the era though that is a 970 graphics card so if that gives you any idea that's a gigabyte winforce 3 card if you're curious but anyway that's besides the point the parts that you can fit are typically going to be limited the defined nano s was something that allowed a fairly robust amount of hardware to be able to be fit in it but what you're going to find today is that a lot of the uh small form factor sff is what your usually itx referred to as fff or ssf no s usually small form factors are referred to as sffs rather than itx or mini itx if you see sff it typically always refers to an itx that's why i put that out there but this particular case is a little bit wider than you would typically find of some sort of a mini itx case today so you want to keep that in mind because they wanted to allow for an offset radiator mount a lot of times you weren't able to do custom water cooling or even aios in an sff build because it was about small form factor that required mini coolers and small power supplies sfx power supplies for sff builds i hate that acronym sff but it's what it is what it is but they wanted you to be able to add at least a 240 millimeter rad on the top you could add one on the front of this build as well but what you obviously are limited to is going to be the length of your card as you can see right here the wind force card is longer than standard or the reference at the time so it interfered with trying to go longer by having my reservoir right there but i was limited because of the custom water cooling in there but look at the size of the motherboard the sff or mini itx motherboard is what limits this to um whatever you can fit on there now with the sff or an itx motherboard you can fit one pcie device that's going to be your graphics card if you're building a gaming computer igpu or apu would mean that you could then put something else on there not sure what you would do on there or why but you're gonna have one expansion slot one pci express slot and that is what you're gonna be limited to on the back this chassis did allow a decent amount of cable management as you can see i've got all my cables coiled up right here where you can't see them i've got a fan splitter right here fan controller splitter um i've got my samsung evo ssd this is still a fully working system i could plug it in right now and os would be exactly where i left it 66 000 updates behind but this is kind of the best case scenario for a small form factor because cable management is the other thing to think about if you're trying to do a small form factor build what's nice about a case this size though it has a small footprint what you're going to find now is a lot of vertical style itx cases where instead of taking up a longer rectangle footprint it's usually maybe 10 or 12 inches square and then they build upright and everything's on its side that way you go vertical axis in terms of space rather than taking up death space so if you are looking for uh the amount of the maximum amount of room on your desk as possible then a small form factor itx build is probably going to be for you now fortunately most brands these days whether it be a lien lee or fractal design um not corsair i don't believe they have a small form factor build that you can buy and build yourself they have the corsair one which in my opinion is like the best looking small form factor case out there the problem is it's fully assembled already as a system you can't build and it's not bare bones if space is your thing and you need as much of it as possible then you're not going to want to go with a mid tower or super tower or full tower even because of the fact that they're going to take up much more desk space but what you're trading off for that is the components that you can fit inside the height of the coolers that will fit if you're going air cooling aios typically will fit these days the length and height of the graphics card itself as well now that a lot of graphics cards especially 30 series and 6000 series with amd are high wattage high heat parts they're going with bigger coolers that may not fit in something like this if i didn't have this water cooler in here i would be able to fit a modern graphics card in here barely because as you can see the power supply is right under there and that fan is going to be choked off and not be able to get as much air flow to it so these are the things that you trade off whether you go with a small form factor build which is why most people go with a mid tower which is what we're going to show you next now in my personal opinion mid-tower cases are where you can get yourself into the most trouble thinking things will fit uh when they actually don't in fact i've had that happen more often than not in mid-tower cases in any other case uh let me explain the reason for that mid tower is not a standard mid tower just means it can fit an atx motherboard which is a full-size atx motherboard the problem is atx itself comes in a bunch of different flavors you got atx and you got eatx and got ee atx i think a lot of times people will just see the atx part and go oh that's going to fit now in the corsair 5000 x which we have right here which you can tell it's an x because it has the glass panels if it was mesh then it would be a d um which is funny because you think it would be i know 5000 g for glass and 5000 a for airflow i don't know whatever the names are weird this particular motherboard as you can see is an atx but it's slightly wider than us than a normal atx form factor but it's not as wide as an eatx form factor eatx motherboards themselves aren't even conforming to a standard anymore these days they're just okay does it does it use the farther mounts is it wider than an atx okay it's e80x so you can have some that will fit and some won't this particular case though would fit an eatx because of how far over the grommets are and that's the kind of thing you want to look at when it comes to your case especially in mid tower if you're trying to run an eatx motherboard even a standard atx the reason for that is this case utilizes a flat motherboard tray so it's flat all the way across some cases like the lean lea although not a standard mid tower it is a dual chamber case does have kind of a shelf that comes off and so the motherboard is higher than the grommet which gives you room to loop the cables back if you need to but fractal design in the past had the motherboard tray recessed and then the part next to it between the fans in the front of the case actually came out and had a higher height if you will than the motherboard tray so you kind of have the z shape which means if the motherboard fit in that space you had to be able to make sure you had room for your plugs to make it over into the grommet or to go straight into the into the grommets that were on that angle eatx cases for the longest time or motherboards did not fit in fractal design mid-tower cases because of the fact that they didn't account for the eatx motherboard width with when it came to where they put the grommets fortunately things have kind of moved forward and in most case manufacturers have now discovered that eatx motherboards are very popular now especially with threadripper being mainstream available that all with amd making that popular now a lot of cases have really accounted for atx stuff just about every modern rog motherboard these days is eatx and now eacx with right angle connectors which makes it nearly impossible to fit in many cases fortunately this one would work with a right angle the problem is it just might be really close to where this grommet is you need to keep that in mind but what you gain with a mid-tower case is obviously cubic volume inside cooling with sff case is not that big of a deal if you're able to have enough intake and exhaust fans some itx cases don't have good airflow at all they might have one fan and then they rely on just the expansion of heat or convection to for heat to move from hot to cold and then it's not great at cooling at the sacrifice you know cooling for space a mid tower as you can see we've got three fans on the front of this we got three fans at the top we got three fans on the motherboard tray which this is a very popular thing now a lot of cases are doing this um an exhaust fan on the back so you get lots of airflow but you also are able to go with full-size parts we have a full-size power supply down here not an sfx power supply we've got our 3080 ti tough sitting here looking small actually given the size that's in this case we could go with some sort of like a 413 or msi card that's even bigger than everything else we got 360 radiator aio in the front no problems fitting any of this whatsoever and then what you're going to gain obviously on the back is a lot more space for cable management so you can see in this particular build we've got a cable nzxt fan controller down here we've got a ssd mounted another fan controller here another fan controller here another fan controller want fan controllers you can fit one two three four of them in this case but you get this channel that gives you a place to not to think about how to route your cables is kind of designed for you or lost more small form factor cases aren't going to necessarily do that now obviously in this case you would be able to fit custom water cooling if you want to go that route but this keeps things to a very manageable amount of desk space needed in fact at the scholars collective if you guys saw those videos where we built 10 systems in 5000 d cases with the airflow we were able to fit 10 of these on fairly small desks with 27-inch monitors and still have plenty of room for your keyboard and mouse and not feel like you were crammed and everything was kind of falling in on yourself so it was a good test for us to see how well this form factor worked there because i think the deaths were only 22 or 23 inches deep and then they were 48 inches wide which is four feet that's not a lot of space for a 27-inch monitor a tower keyboard mouse you know and the gaming mat and all that stuff if you're like me though and you just are like you know what go big or go home well that's where the full tower slash super tower comes in so i've kind of put full tower and super tower together because i feel like those two classes have sort of kind of joined at some point you just have a full tower and then super tower would be something crazy like the the elite from phanteks right or like what phil is using for his editing rig which is again a fantastic system that a case that could fit two computers inside of it an itx build and an eatx build if you wanted those are absolute absolutely gargantuan not many people run those it's a very specific unique use case of anyone that would need that if you put them side by side the additional height and the width is essentially the same maybe slightly wider here on the full tower super tower but this is basically the same thing as a mid tower just scaled up a little bigger so instead of a 360 in the front we have a 480 in the front so the 480 means we've got four 120 millimeter fans we've got a 240 right here we could have fit a 360 if i was not particular about how i want to do my bends right there this is that giant msi card i was talking about so you can see the amount of graphics card we can fit in there and it still looks small especially with a big giant reservoir right next to it but if you look in here at the motherboard this is a threadripper motherboard this is the uh the zenith extreme so that is a the widest eatx motherboard you're going to find until you start getting into that ee atx form factor which is where you're starting to look at like server formats and such and as you can see fits on there just fine with plenty of room to get our cables looped back around through our grommet holes extra height gives us the ability to run radiator and fan and tubing and not interfere with our motherboard which is something that if we look over here at the mid tower real quick you can see we start running out of space fairly quickly at the top before we would be able to you know be able to fit parts i'm able to fit the rad the fan and this tube centered in the distance between the fan and the top of the heatsink right here without any interference but if you look right here where the power cables are for the motherboard this would become a very difficult fit without having an interesting routing of these cables because you add the 30 mil of a rad right here now you're going to be digging dangling you know tubes down in front of your system which isn't a problem i mean obviously we're doing it over there but that extra height right here that you can see between the two although it doesn't look like much is a huge difference when it comes to the amount of parts that you can fit in there now what you can't tell by looking at these side by side like this is any sort of actual true scale or comparison remember the first build i showed you was an itx form factor this is an itx motherboard with a knock to a cooler on it as you can see now you see why i said some systems will allow you to run an it or cases will allow you to run an itx motherboard in there as well as an eatx so this is an itx motherboard compared to the full tower so you could actually mount this in there you could there are mounts there are provisions the holes are drilled for the standoffs for you to put an itx motherboard in this case if you wanted but for lulz too this is the decent size itx chassis compared to it so as you can see you got a lot of options here when it comes to form factors and there's a ton of different um like i said iterations of you know how they wanted to build a chassis that can fit those particular motherboards it might seem like comm common knowledge to be like oh duh bigger case can fit bigger stuff but what let me tell you what is kind of sacrilegious in my opinion when we do the j rate my setup we get some folks that will send us a picture of a big tower like this that has a micro atx motherboard a small graphics card and an aio and it's empty there's just nothing in there now maybe they're setting up for the future but that's wasted opportunity right yeah these towers the bigger they get the more expensive they get along with it not only does the size scale up so does the price and if you're not going to be utilizing the hardware and filling out the chassis there's really no point in doing that most people don't need anything more than a mid tower because mid towers will fit 99 of the build needs of anyone building a system today and i mean if you wanted to use a mid tower case you could still go full custom water cooling like we've shown in fact i've got that exact case that's on the end right there in the d format this starts to look like a corsair ad i swear it's not this was my build that i took my graphics card out of my personal build but look there's two a couple tubes in there i forgot i took them out my point is you could take that exact chassis that's the glass version this is the air cooled version and you can obviously fit plenty of components in there to be able to water cool your system and upgrade that later on if you want to hey look it's the g2 since water block sold out twice there's some things to consider obviously when you're choosing your next case space is not the only thing to consider though the bigger the chassis the bigger the components the heavier it is and the sturdiness of your desk is going to matter this system right here weighs about 60 pounds this system weighs about 45 pounds in this system that's about 30 pounds i mean they're all water cooled i mean that one's an ai oh so that obviously adds weight but that's something to consider because we're going to start adding weight and adding tubes and fluid and stuff to your system and you've got a rickety folding table for a desk there are things you need to consider there so anyway file this video under duh but i get a lot of people asking questions about cases and stuff and with there being so many different types of cases on the market this was some food for thought i wanted to give you guys i enjoy making these kinds of videos because it's not often you get to just sort of like kind of do a data dump the amount of information that you've sort of crammed in your brain noggin and your brain bucket over the last 10 years of touching hundreds and hundreds of different components and seeing how they fit together and how they don't it can save somebody potentially a costly mistake or restocking fees or rmas or having to swap parts out because you did a boo-boo and they don't fit together like i've done a million times which is why i show you every time it doesn't work like when i was building chris's build and then i screwed it up twice so all right there you go guys what size form factor are you using but most importantly why are you using that form factor what do you look for when you build a system case wise is it about noise is it about cooling is it about the footprint and the size sound off down below guys and i'll pin your best comments thanks for watching and i'll see in the next

Channel: JayzTwoCents

Views: 998,100

Keywords: case size, pc case, pc case size, sff, mid-tower, midtower, mid tower, full tower, full-tower, full tower case, super tower case, computer case, best size computer case

Id: 3uaT3kXEKxg

Length: 19min 7sec (1147 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 13 2022