Why arePC cases so damn useless and ugly nowadays. It's either a cheapo metal box with perforation on the side panel (why?!), Or a decent one with filters but also with a shitty and useless glass panel formo reason.

Why can't cases be just functional metal boxes with filters? Why all that useless shit?

You aren't looking in the right places. Most of Fractal Design's range is exactly what you're looking for. I think all of the models that are with tempered glass side panels are also offered with solid side panels too.

There are other solid brands too - beQuiet!, Corsair, LianLi. There's plenty of choice if you don't cheap out (after all a case is something that won't just become obsolete in 5 years), so IMO it's worth it to spend a little more.

@kamen forgot to mention that my residency is in a god forsaken place where you get what some companies ship here, otherwise the shipping cost is just insane.

And I'm still using a 10+ years old CoolerMaster Scout.

I like the be quiet silent base series. Not cheap, but it's looking good and won't cut your fingers.

@saucyatom pure base 600 is one of the most appealing so far

Also, useless midi towers with no space for 3.5 inch drives. Why? it's not a miniature microITX case...

@iiii Some cases just only have some of the 3.5" cages installed, others don't install them at all, but I have yet to see a non-ITX (or another SFF) case that doesn't support 3.5" at all. Some have dropped the 5.25" support (rightfully so IMO).

By the way I've realised that even one HDD can be the noisiest part of a PC that's not under load. My case (Define R5) supports up to 8; silly me was thinking that I'd populate all of them years ago when I bought the case. Looking forward to the day when my PC will be SSD-only; maybe when there are 4 TB SSDs that don't cost an arm and a leg...

@kamen if there were cheap and large SDDs I would have done the same. But it's not the case so only HDD is the answer.

Well... this brand tops even all others here mentioned:

https://streacom.com/

Be careful not to drool over your keyboards.

@kamen @iiii I've found that in practice your working set of stuff is rarely larger than what you can fit in the local SSD, so my desktop has no HDDs. I have my old box with three HDDs in it hooked up as remote storage and I use AFS to mount it as a network drive on my desktop. Since HDDs are for bulk storage, not work (usually), it shouldn't matter that much if you keep them over a network. Also quieter that way.

With properly done caching in your network FS this works okayish for games too unless you're running something massive. Running a game is mostly reading, not writing, so give it a large local cache and you should be good. Unless you're the type that likes to hop around games a lot I guess. Also kinda needs a good home network.

@NeatNerdPrime
That cases look like old Macs. Disgusting!

@Oktokolo well, personally, the DB4 is a gem :-)

There are other form factors, but i like their style and durability

Edit i wrongly referenced DB1 , but i intended to mention the "cube" DB4, fanless, no moving parts... perfect!

@RememberMe how to make cache? 🤔

@iiii AFS (Andrew File System) has a cache manager that you can configure. Every network file system should have this. I just use AFS because I use it for work too and I know somebody who helped set it up, you could use any network file system and it should do the same job. You don't need AFS' multi user distributed cluster capabilities, I just ignore all that.

Because this stupid fucking generation seems to think RGB makes a computer faster...

Don't they know, black computers are faster. Its a fact and its in the physics.

@Demolishun What if you paint some flames on it?

@saucyatom I will allow this. As long as the base color is black. lol

@RememberMe never heard of that filesystem...

@Demolishun no, red goes fasta!

@iiii http://www.dansdata.com/black.htm

I just rackmount all my shit tbf :|

And for builds for clients I generally use something like a Corsair 4000D (which had good airflow and looks pretty good too)

That's what happens when there just has to be progress, but there isn't. The result is change just for presenting something new - and worse.

Try finding a good mini tower with filtered mesh front, intake front-low and exhaust rear-high as per the ATX spec, and then capable of taking an internal optical drive. It's surprisingly hard.

bequiet's Pure Base 600 comes close, but has that stupid manual fan regulation button sitting there with no function because any decent mobo has better automatic fan control with silent preset.

Most other shit? Have a front fan behind a massive glass wall where it's completely retarded. At most, suck in air through some tiny slots at the side of the front panel. Or have a midi tower but no way to fit a 5.25" optical drive.

I'm still using my 10 year old Lancool PC-K58 from a time where competent engineers and not stupid designers constructed cases.

@Fast-Nop pure base 600 sucks air through side slits as well

@Fast-Nop btw, do you exhaust horizontally or vertically?

@iiii there are a whole bunch of distributed filesystems, like AFS, Lustre, Gluster, HDFS, Ceph etc. since the needs of distributed/cluster/HPC work is different from ye olde server. AFS is one of the OGs and pioneered much distributed FS work, but it's a bit of a dinosaur and not used much outside academia. The company facing clusters we use run Lustre (which was also an academic project but is now used pretty much everywhere in HPC, including supercomputers).

@iiii Oh yes correct, the 600 is not even as good as the 10 year old one I have, it was kind of the least evil. Exhaust is always horizontally. Otherwise, dust falls in while the PC is off.

@iiii One good case could be PHANTEKS Enthoo Pro with metal side wall, but that's 110 EUR.

@Fast-Nop pure base is around 100 USD anyway (where I live)

besides the bequiet I have last used the Nanoxia Deep Silence 4 (I just looked it up - it was 65€, 3 years ago). Very satisfied except for interference issues with the front usb when using both slots (though that might be more related to the devices).

@RememberMe I do photography, so I want to have my whole library available locally. It currently is about 900 GB. A midrange 2 TB SATA SSD will probably do fine to replace the only remaining HDD in my system (5 TB), but ideally I should go for 4.

I have most of my important stuff duplicated on the NAS that's running in the closet (also for noise reasons) and the bulk of my storage sits there too - music, movies, series, system backups.

Thanks for the tip, I'll check out AFS.