New case format for m.2 SSDs

Its interesting this got bumped and made me think of all this. Crazy that I posted this 5 years ago and the progress in the case world has been so bad I just can't imagine thinking about this 5 years ago all the case makers have made almost no progress in all that time. I actually just built a new computer and bought a new case in the last month so I spent some time looking. The case is still a pretty standard-looking mid ATX with very close to the same dimensions that was the best I could find. I looked around quite a bit and came up with nothing that would really make me happy so I settled on a case that was just alright and conservative. Ultimately these case makers have just opted to make the extra space that was associated with the drive cages to hold water cooling and tons of extra RGB fans. And another funny thing is they have mostly just stopped caring about making cases light, the majority of heavy tempered glass side windows, and its rare to see any offered with aluminum. In my case I ended up with a case where it hides some 2.5 inch drives on the back side of the motherboard, but it still had a 3.5 cage but you could remove it, which I did. In the end though there is just a ton of useless wasted space up front even with front intake fans.

That mATX looks nice but I have never wanted to limit myself to mATX and my current motherboard ended up being a full ATX good news is at least I got 3 M.2 slots.

While I am bitching why are PSU makers still putting those huge hideous stickers right on the side of the PSU instead of putting it on the top or making it smaller.
 
I don't know how mATX is limiting in any way, you can have mATX boards with full fledged Z chipsets (ie latest z590), two PCI-E x16 and one or two PCI-E x1, as well as four RAM slots, two m.2 slots, etc. So you can have a full fledged enthusiast PC, with SLI GPU, sound card, etc. With ATX all the extra PCI-E slots are never going to be used by 99% of people anyway.
 
They limit your options for deals and features. For instance in this case I got a full ATX motherboard during prime day from amazon warehouse open box plus 25% off. If I had been limited to mATX this deal would have just been missed. This motherboard was stacked and had 3 m.2 slots for a price close to average motherboards. And in general I have found that having that capacity leaves me with more flexibility over time. For instance if I upgrade the case or want do use some old parts again they might only be full ATX parts. On the flip side if I end up with a mATX motherboard it always works in the same case. ROFL my ex had a mATX motherboard in a $200 full tower lian li case and still does.


Also another point somehow I forgot about that raijintek case actually looks pretty good going to look into it more. lol maybe I will have an extra case if the airflow seems acceptable.

Also people here should look at the Goodisory S200 its a case that is interesting for mATX but I think it had some PSU limitations I didn't like.
 
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This is really a fail from both case and motherboard manufacturers to stick with the ATX format. Who actually uses all the PCI-E slots on the ATX anymore, and who is going to use all three m.2 slots - you're already sharing bandwidth even with two.

ATX parts should work fine in mATX cases. I built another Sliger Cerberus for my niece late last year, Asus Z490, i5-10700, RTX3080 (snatched at the micro center few days after it was released), 32gb ram, Corsair SF-750. Everything fit just fine. and with the exception of the CPU, this is as hardcore as most enthusiasts ever get. I wanted to stay with air cooling, otherwise I could have easily gone for overclocked i9-10900k, the case is able to accomodate a 280mm AIO.

Again, I'm not super happy with the Cerberus, it's far from perfect, but its the smallest mATX available.
 
I had one. I sold it. You really can’t water cool because of where the radiator would have to go. The pump would be the highest point in the system. It’s not really wide enough to use high end air either so you are left with a middling system. They should make another version of it with a swing out fan bracket like the cooler master nr200 so you could mount a radiator.

I liked the build quality though.
 
I hope they dont remove the 3.5/5.25" bays, I just bought a nice fan controller the other day that goes in a 5.25" slot, plus high capacity HDD's are all 3.5".

Also, as someone who just put a 980 Pro in my system, I can confidently say I continue to be unimpressed with the actual real world performance of NVMe compared to regular SATA drives. Moving from a single HDD to a high performance RAID setup was noticeably better, moving from RAID HDD to single SATA SSD was (eventually......I think the original 32/40gb drives were slower than HDD) noticably better, moving from a single SATA SSD to RAID SSDs was probobly worse as IIRC I lost TRIM support and some other wear-leveling features, but I did get more space. Then theres NVMe, which on paper is insanely fast, but in the real world I havent noticed any difference compared to a decent SATA3 SSD, plus it has an INCREDIBLY inconvenient form factor. Youre physically limited by board space, as you need a decently open strip of real estate to mount the drive, plus are you really going to be able to get 6 drives on a standard board without sacrificing other things like number of expansion slots? Most standard motherboards have 6 SATA slots pretty conveniently located out of everything elses way and thats the entire footprint (southbridge handles the I/O and most "RAID" is just emulated in the CPU), you can even get boards like this:

https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Z87 Extreme11ac/index.asp

22 SATA ports, other than using somthing like a U.2 breakout cable to some sort of drive backplane, how would you get 22 NVMe drives connected to a system?

Just the other day, I had to take an M.2 drive out of one of my computers, naturally its placed in the least convenient location possible (directly under the GPU's). But I cant just take the GPU thats covering it out, because the board ALSO has those stupid PCIe locks that prevent you from working on your computer. So I needed to take all 4 of the GPUs out starting with the bottom one, as that was the only way to release the lock on the card above it, all of that just to swap one stupid drive that could have easily just been a couple SATA cables on a drive that I shoved behind the side panel, removable without any tools. That particular application does require the increased bandwidth of NVMe vs AHCI/SATA (4 systems reading off of the same drive at once), so im stuck using this garbage until a more convenient solution is invented :(

Thank you for coming to my ted talk rant :D
 
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