Looks like a modded out pc battery backup, lol. Soory ID.

To each his own, I have a giant tower, the A+case "ElDiablo".I like a fancy case, however, functionality is cool too!

Looks like liquid cooling in the screeny, is that your plan also?

ANd yes Starkers, kinda appealing after the second look, the case, not you, although, send a pic, lol! 

What on earth do you do for optical drives?

Sometimes I think 'small' becomes just plain useless....

Only experience I've had with a 'small' mobo was less than brilliant....hottest part of GPU ended up right on top of the southbridge....requiring the latter to be constantly monitored for getting toasty.

Only advantage was.... I only paid $6 for the whole shebang [not the GPU that was an XFX GTX285 I already had spare].

All my boxes I've built run 2 DVDs [and too many drives to squeeze into that box].

These days the only limitation re size is whether it'll fit into the computer desk I built...

Now that you guys mentioned it.....it does look like a toaster........

Im not cheering quite for Mini-ITX/µATX build as "Gaming rig" for office ok, but for Gaming?   
If you want to build a Gaming rig what CPU are you aiming for?
Is current Gen even supported on those small boards and if they are will they offer enough space for all those goodies like PCI-E x16 *2 or 3 ? Will those be 3.0 with 16 lanes or only 2.0 with 4?
Also will it have four Slots for Ram and so on?
I think having only 11,2x8,2 space will not allow that or does it? Haven#t checked the market for some time...

Do you already know what kind of CPU you want? I7- K model or maybe X?
How many drives should it have how many GPU´s? 

Don´t understand how one will be able to build a DVD drive into that case?
I don’t see a slot for it or will you go for external drive?
I only see three fans, guess that means you will have to buy at least two additional fans if you want to cool it solely with Air.
Would calculate those costs into the price and see if you can get something better for the same buck. Just a thought.



 

I've been contemplating upgrading my case too, but that's because my SOHO file server tower isn't big enough...

I can't use 2 of my 10 drive slots because the GPU is too big so I'm only running a mirror for my 3TB primary storage drives instead of raid 1+0.  I need a deeper form factor to get Steam off my damned SSD before it uses the whole 750GB!

That's easy for such a case... use an external drive that can easily sit on the desktop.  I use a Samsung portable with my 11" laptop, which is USB powered and does okay at both reading and writing.  However, I do prefer dual optical drives that are internally mounted for my main rig... can save alot of time copying files to HDD for later burning, etc.

As for small and useless.... getting "toasty", Corsair liquid cooling is quite effective and would do a good job at keeping components cool in this case, and given there are 3 mounting places for liquid cooling, one unit could be assigned to the CPU and dual GPUs respectively, thus cooling the 3 hottest components quite well.

Having said that, I would not use this case as a main PC, rather as a guest or backup PC that serves to surf the net, create documents, etc... nothing that's resource intensive, and I certainly wouldn't install high-end components in it as I have all that in my main rig, and thus it would not need power to burn.

As John pointed out above, the unit in the screenshots is Corsair liquid cooling, not water cooling, which are sealed units and thus makes them safer around PC components. I have one in my main rig and find it better than air cooling, hence I would be inclined to go with liquid cooling in a smaller case such as this one.  It wouldn't be essential but recommended, especially if you are going with higher end CPU and GPUs for gaming.

While I quite like the Corsair Carbide 240 for its compact design, I'm somewhat impressed with the Corsair Carbide 540 as well.  It is a larger case and has plenty of room for large GPUs, liquid cooling, etc.  It could very well be a consideration if I ever wanted to change from the Thermaltake cases I currently have for my main rigs.

To be honest, I haven't used an optical drive for a while because the need hasn't arisen of late, but I still like to have them for burning off hard copies of things like skin collections, documents, photos and program installers, etc.... and Bluray discs hold so much data these days it's fairly economical to back up your most important files to disc.  So yeah, I think I'll be keeping mine for a while to come.

Yes, for a compact case it has rather good air cooling, but adding liquid cooling for the CPU and GPU(s) would allow for some 'beastly' high-end components to be installed.... so yes, it has potential to become quite a decent work/gaming machine.  However, I'm a bit like Jafo when it comes to my main rig.... bigger is better cos there's alot of stuff to go inside: what with multiple HDDs and SDDs; Dual GPUs; soundcards; TV Tuner Cards; SATA and IDE expansion cards, etc.

Having said that, I could see a couple of these replacing the towers housing my backup and guest PCs... cos they're compact and so much better looking than those old things.  Those cream/white towers may have looked good in their day, but I much prefer black finishes for all my PC gear, looks slick and more elegant IMHO.

External USB Optical drive can cover for those rare usages - most mobos support booting from USB drives now. 

@starkers sorry quote does not work for me 
you could go for SLI or Xfire  just would need more fans like i mentioned
you would still have one slot free for a soundcard if you want to have a better one than the on-board sound or you could add your TV card
still if you want PCI-e SSD your limited of course

To the liquid cooling part for the CPU don’t let yourself fool the closed prefilled corsair liquid cooling isn’t as good as a Noctua NH-D14 
There have been numerous tests were they overclock the CPU and a BSOD pops up on corsair while the system stays stable with the NH-D14
However if you use proper Liquid cooling with a big radiator that’s a different story.
When it comes to GPU´s most reference cards get blazing hot while other DC, OC cards mostly come with different coolers that are pretty good ASUS cards for example stay cool unless you let them run on 100% usage with certain tools. But in practice that hardly ever happens.
For example i have a solely Air cooled Rig i never exceed CPU temps of 40C and my GPU is mostly on 60C on Ultra settings when gaming mainly because i have a fan positioned to blow right onto the card. And my rig is super silent you don’t hear anything but air moving but that’s it.
I know some rigs that have reference cards installed that sound like a vacuum cleaners when they get beyond 50% Fan speed.
Bought a "Gainward Phantom" one day because i was told they would stay cool well it did but the noise was terrible.

starkers, the problems with external drives are

1 MORE powerpoints in use, and more power being used (assuming the higher capacity desktop drive externals)(also the laptop (no power brick) drives are SLOWER than the desktop drives and hold less data

2 usb3 interface does slow the data transfers compared to the internal sata 3 to the same model drive

3 external drives usually run about 10+ c hotter (hdds make cpus look temp tolerant) and with hdds you want the temps to be as close to ambient as possible, not as FAR as possible (and hdds should NOT exceed 50 c, and it is not uncommon with an ambient of 30c to have external hdds get to 60c)

4 extra desk space taken up by external drives

5 usb interface occasionally FORGETS that it is connected (even in the middle of transfers, corrupting the hdd AND the transfer)

harpo the NON-subscriber