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Larger cases can still be useful for cooling purposes. Not everyone is into the whole "cram everything into every square inch possible" fad. Nothing beats a well built full tower.
This describes me in a nutshell. I don't like to work on cramped tiny ass cases. I'm running a Thermaltake clone (Thermalfake) of a Caselabs design as I bought it right about the time Caselabs went under.
Yup. Case designers sometimes forget to factor in "tool/hand space" in their everlasting quest of chasing space efficiency. Same thought process plagues car designs.
Caselabs made cases beyond full tower. They made modular water cooling cases that needed more internal volume than normal.
Oh boy, more poorly made ill fitting LL and Corsair cases. If they want to sell out on the CaseLabs name and go that route well that's their business. But hey, that's the market. Everyone seems to want to spend $3000 on parts and bling to toss into the cheapest case possible. Mashing radiators wherever and starving fans behind hideaway panels and whatnot.
Hell yes. I tried the sff thing years ago. The memories will persist long time. Mid towers can slide at times, but full tower ftw.
Or hire a competent engineering tech. Sheet metal is gravy if you have the flats worked out. That is literally the hard part
Caselabs never made sense to me from a business perspective. I had nothing against having ultra-high end offerings. However, I always wondered how the company survived when all of their cases started at "really fucking expensive" and only went up from there. If you want to have a successful business, top tier items you sell only a few units of is hard to sustain a business on. Back in the day, the brushed Aluminum Lian-Li's and Caselabs type cases were several hundred dollars, but how many units did they really move? Lian-Li was smart enough to have more diverse offerings, Caselabs wasn't. I'm not sure what their sales numbers were, but Caselabs obviously didn't move enough units to sustain them.
There is nothing wrong with the Lian-Li PC-O11 Dynamic. It's a great case for the price. If you think that's a bad quality case, you haven't done enough budget builds. I've built systems in abhorrent cases that would have you begging a customer to spend just a few dollars more on their case. Cases so bad that it would make you debate about kicking a few bucks in yourself just so you wouldn't have to cut your fingers to the bone on cases with razor thin walls that cut deep like a scalpel with all the precision of a rusty steak knife. Cases with wire management so bad, you are pretty sure that it was designed by someone who never tested the case with actual computer hardware in it during its development. Or even cases so bad, you can't believe the people who designed it ever actually built computers before.
I liked the 900D, but the fact is that Corsair has gotten better at its case game over the years. That being said, no one case has ever been 100% perfect. Yes, a Lian-Li O11-Dynamic or Dynamic XL isn't perfect either, but they are popular because they are better than the vast majority of what's out there. The quality is what you'd expect for the money. However, the actual design of the Lian-Li cases is pretty good. I've built a number of machines in those cases and have very few complaints about them. That's both for air cooled and water cooled builds. Soft tubing, hard, AIO,etc. I've done it all in the Lian-Li PC-O11 Dynamic/XL. I've also built a number of machines in the Corsair Crystal cases. I like those less, but you can certainly do worse.
Multi-GPUs may be out, but GPUs are by far the hottest part of a system these days so single GPUs being 3+ slots are in. Even if you go for water cooling, GPUs are requiring some serious radiator consideration to keep em cool. More room is always welcome, says the guy with an air cooled Fractal Define 7 XL.
Increased case volume can have a negative effect with air-cooling. Positive or negative pressure inside of a case has an effect on performance.
I've only heard people mention how well built and sturdy they are. Now would one fit together the same way it did on day one vs 20 years down the road? Who knows, but if it did I could totally see the value in that. Whereas with my 900D I swear, 5 years down the road and nothing quite fits smoothly.
I agree with this approach. But the finishes and tolerances may not be the same to support legacy users.
I spoke to CL directly and said they needed to branch off and start doing steel cases. They decided to make the larger than needed S-line of cases, S3, S5 and S8. The people in the Overclock.net forum roasted me for tell them that. CL told me that's something they will never do, listening to the hype of their customer base. Then Thermaltake copied using steel cases, Trump tariffs increased the price of aluminum "to them" almost 50% and they lost a major government contract.....boom out of business.
Mine SMA8 case's build quality is still rock solid after 7 years. Only complaint I've ever had is that the way the door hinges work they're a pain to attach from the side/front because you can't really see what you're doing. From the rear would be fine, but that's not really an option for me unless I unplug everything and roll it away from the wall. It's only really an issue after I've been working on something since I like to leave things open until I'm sure they're working well.
The new owner seems really conscious of this. As far as baseline prices, back in 2019 they got quotes from a local fab in Sweden that basically said they'd be able to keep to the same prices as CaseLabs Cali, but of course a lot has happened with supply lines since then so they're going to keep looking. If things are entirely fabbed in Sweden, then the owner admitted that yeah it would probably be a higher price to have everything shipped to the US, similar to how buying in Europe would have been shipped from here. However, he's also looking into partnership with a variety of other local resellers and even fabricators so that, if up to quality, would be able to have US orders fabbed in the US, EU orders fabbed in Sweden etc. I saw a post dated 2 months back on a watercooling subreddit where someone suggested that Sliger, the US based manufacturer known for the CerberusX and other boutique smaller cases, may be suitable and a rep from Sliger was in the thread interested to talk! Not sure if anything will come of this of course. I also have another suggestion with whom they could partner and as soon as I can talk to the owner I'll let you know if its amenable.
about anything but how fast they can crank the parts out. Which would be bad for quality.