Congratulaions! You finally finished choosing parts for your PC and the only thing remaining is the case (also called chassis). Fortunately this task is no big deal compared to the previous ones, you just need to pay attention so stay with us until the end.
Quick Shopping Tips
- Case size is important, case form factor determines the size of the motherboard and the dimensions of the case tell you if components like the CPU cooler will fit in it or not.
- Air flow is also crucial to ensure your case doesn’t get too hot so make sure to get a case with good air flow.
- If you don’t want to worry about cable management, skip cases with side windows.
Price
Have in mind the budget that you have for your case and based on it select a range of cases that you will choose from. It’s also important to include everything related to the case in its budget when making comparisons.
For instance, if you saw two cases that are almost identical but one of them is cheaper and it comes with fewer fans. If the fans of the cheaper case are enough to provide good air flow, go ahead and buy it. If not then you need to add the cost of more fans to the cost of the case and then see if it is still cheap.
Case Size
When it comes to case size there are two things that you should consider, form factor and clearance.
There are several form factors for PC cases, each one of them is made for a certain motherboard form factor here is a list of the most common ones:
- Full tower for extended ATX motherboards
- Mid tower for ATX motherboards
- Micro-ATX for micro-ATX motherboards
- Mini-ITX for mini-ITX motherboards
Let’s say that you have an ATX motherboard and you chose a mid tower, should you buy it? No, not yet. You have to check the dimensions of the case to make sure that your components will fit in. If you have a CPU air cooler you have to check if the cooler is too tall for the case. If you have an AIO cooler then you need to make sure that there is enough space for the radiator. Also, check if the length of your GPU is supported by your case.
All of that can be done in two different ways. You can browse through spec sheets for all of your components to see what things are compatibile with each other. Or, you can use PCPartPicker to know if these parts can be used together.
Disclaimer: we expect pcpartpicker to be correct most of the time but we don’t gurantee that it will be right 100% of the time.
Air Flow
Another important thing is air flow. Without good air flow your case is likely to be hotter which doesn’t only limit the performance that you get but also can harm some of your components in the future.
All PC cases come with vents for the fans to be mounted. Try to avoid cases with ventilation on only 1 side, 2 sides is fine but 3 is ideal for most people. You may also find cases with vents on 4 sides which is very beneficial if your components generate a lot of heat.
Another thing that impacts air flow is the presence of anything that allows air flow (typically a grilled panel or a mesh front panel) which makes the case cooler compared to a fully closed case.
Case Build Quality
One of the main reasons why your components are kept inside the case is to be protected. Which means that a case built with bad materials won’t be very good at this task.
Before buying the case there aren’t many ways to judge its build quality. You can try to avoid cheap cases from unkown brands but the best way to be sure about what you are buying is to check reviews.
Other Deciding Factors
If you got the most important stuff that we mentioned above out of the way, you will still see a variety of options and features in PC cases. We will go over them in this section.
Drive bays provide a convenient way to store drives like HDDs and SSDs inside the PC case. Modern bays have three main widths (in inches) which are listed below.
- 5.25″ bays: they are used for optical drives like DVDs and Blu-rays.
- 3.5″ bays: commonly used for HDDs
- 2.5″ bays: mainly used for SSDs
If you are planning on getting any of the above you have to make sure that its respective bay is present in the case. If you already have a case but it doesn’t have the bay you want you can always use a drive externally and connect it to your case via a USB port.
Cable management is an important topic if you want your case that has a side window to look nice or simply want to keep everything tidy and in order.
Ideally, cases with really good cable management will have holes placed in startegic places these holes might even have their edges covered by rubber to protect your cables. Moreover, you are going to find points were you can tie your cables or even channels for the cables to go through which gives you a lot of control about how you want to organise them.
Some other cool features are extra space behind the motherboard tray, the ability to remove a drive cage if you aren’t using it and a PSU shroud that hides your PSU along with its cables.
Conclusion
- Decide your budget.
- Select a form factor based on your motherboard (full tower, mid tower, micro-ATX or mini-ITX).
- Use PCPartPicker or spec sheets to make sure that all of your components can fit inside the case.
- Doing that will narrow down your options, now all you have to do is compare based on price, air flow, build quality, cable management, drive bays, RGB and any other feature that you might want.
- Now it’s time to read reviews about the case that you want to buy.
