I know this doesn't fit your needs but I always do budget builds and I prefer the cheapest smallest case that will fit a full sized ATX board that I can find. Tends to be about 2 full sized drive bays and a 3.5" bay. My main desktop was about $40 shipped on newegg and to save space they moved the power supply to the bottom front corner which I think is pretty slick. I recently picked up a similarly small but not relocated psu case on ebay a few months ago for cheap. The metal was flimsy and the coating scratched easily but unless you're traveling around with it, which I doubt since you're looking at full towers, I don't see the need for anything fancy. Most of the time the tower just sits hidden anyways. Obviously i'm not a fan of the case modding scene, to me a case is just something to keep my cats from getting electrocuted, and I'm not sure of the point of a million optical drives these days. As for CPU, I just like to make sure they support virtualization, the lower end/older chips tend to not. -Scott -----Original Message----- From: tclug-list-bounces at mn-linux.org on behalf of Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom Sent: Tue 7/27/2010 9:55 AM To: tclug-list at mn-linux.org Subject: [tclug-list] choosing a new computer case So I'm finally breaking down and going to get myself a new desktop machine, because Youtube is unusable on a 1.1GHz K7, and Gmail is pretty doggy sometimes when editing. Thing is, I don't have a clue what's good hardware on the market these days. I figured I'd start with a case and go from there; but perhaps I'm being backward and should start with a CPU and narrow down my choices that way. I'd really like a nice big case with lots of room to work in; ideally very quiet. I've been using a Yeong Yang YY-022 for the past 10 years or so; it's a scaled-down version of a double-wide server case. Looks like a black cube-ish thing about 13"x13"x16". It's a bit of a pain to route cables tho; so I'd be happy enough to go back to a conventional layout. Anyone have any good experiences with cases they want to relate? Any good advice on which CPU is at the sweet price point these days? In case you didn't know, I'm not physically in the Twin Cities area (I'm in New Hampshire) so telling me to go down to Tran Micro is not useful. :) -- Carl Soderstrom Systems Administrator Real-Time Enterprises www.real-time.com _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota tclug-list at mn-linux.org http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/ms-tnef Size: 4182 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20100727/433359f8/attachment.bin