Building an Intel Core i7 based computer – Chassis

The last ingredient is the chassis. Likewise PSU it looks like you don’t need to be careful when picking one. Wrong. Chassis are very different and details are important. Let’s go by features in no significant order.

Weight

Cheaper chassis are mostly build from steel (at best the front cover is made by aluminum but they are mostly from steel) while the more expensive are built from aluminum. Which means lower price and more weight. I am not sure how much the material affects cooling – aluminum chassis should perform better. Since my chassis will sit under my desk and I will (hopefully) rarely move it I am not concerned with weight. The cooling difference should be minimal. Thus steel for me, aluminum is an option.

Classic or tool-less

Tool-less design means that you won’t have to toy with screws to mount drives and add-in cards. Instead you’ll easily use custom made plastic gizmos to fix them. Otherwise you’ll have to use a screwdriver (not that fixing a motherboard is still a screwing experience nevertheless). Not a big deal but this is a good feature. I’ll go for this, not at all costs though (I’ll install hardware only once).

Drives mounting direction

Some chassis support drive mounting from side. This makes mounting and even more important, changing, drives much easier. In classic way you have to push the drive towards wire-filled motherboard to get it in or out. But if you have a side mounting option the drive replacement and mounting is much easier. A must.

Size

Mid-tower for me. No need for big tower.

Front side connectors and their placement

I like to have them on the top of the chassis and I am looking for: 2 (at least) x USB and Firewire. e-Sata is a welcome option.

Front side buttons placement

Having power on and reset buttons located at front side is not a very good idea. They are easily involuntarily kicked when the chassis is positioned under the desk (on the floor) and when the access to them is too easy. Which is something you want try to avoid, otherwise you (or your kids) might reset your computer in middle of the work and data will be lost. Pay attention to buttons accessibility to avoid such unpleasant surprises.

Internal ventilation

Once more the keywords here are 12cm fan and a slow rotation to avoid making too much noise. I like to have two of them, one on the front side and the other on the back side. Front side fan should be an intake while the back side one should be an outtake. So the air moves through and cools entire chassis content. Furthermore the front side one should be placed right in the front of hard driver to provide an adequate air flow. If the chassis doesn’t come with built-in fans it should have at least adequate holes.

Design

I don’t care. It will sit under my desk and I won’t look at it often.

PSU location

PSU is usually located at the top of the back side of the chassis. However the recent trend seems to favor putting it on the bottom to improve the temperature reduction inside the PSU itself. I thought this is a nice idea and why not – cooler PSU means lower noise. But later, when I was building the computer I’ve found that it isn’t such a good idea after all for various reasons (details in next post).

That’s it more or less. There are plenty of different chassis out there from many different manufacturers and picking a good one might take quite some time. Usually I buy chassis made by Cooler Master and this time is no different. At my price range they are good enough.

I’ve bought a Cooler Master RC-690-KKN1-GP from AGT.si for 83 Euros. Note: this chassis has PSU located on the bottom of the chassis. The delivery process from AGT took more than a month because the chassis wasn’t in stock and distributer took quite a long time to deliver.

See other relevant posts:

Introduction
CPU cooler
The goal
Power Supply Unit
Memory
Storage
CPU
Graphics card
Motherboard