I don’t get it at all. Is this a case of FOMO?
I’m not a youtube queen, so I don’t need my cases to be display pieces that I beg people to admire.
Point being, why does anyone over, say 20 years old, need to buy a new case? I mean among the tech literate people on forums like this one.
Do you just throw away perfectly good cases in favor of whatever seems more fashionable at the moment?
I have thrown away /recycled many cases, but not to buy new, was just about keeping the pick of the litter once the industry switched to ATX and then stayed there for so long.
SO… many of the cases I kept, don’t have USB3 bezel ports. I don’t keep cases on my desk, is just a waste of desk space, so a USB3 hub makes more sense.
Likewise, if you have your case buffered by desk/wall/etc, you don’t need a half dozen fans to keep airflow under an audible hearing limit, can run them at a little higher RPM and still not hear them above background noise – unless you have some OCD about noise and if so, I’d hate to live that far from civilization that this is possible to attain.
I don’t want to insult people but this is a colossal waste, nobody needs to buy new cases today with so many out there unless building a very unique system where standard cases won’t work… and paying a premium for a Fractal Define R6 then pretending it’s so dated that it deserves an article – it’s madness.
Does no one understand standards, cooling, or just wants some shiny new toy – the latter I can accept and agree with,, we all like our toys if it were a matter of it being smack dab in front of me on my desk, which is the worst outcome I could imagine for my purposes.
I shove my antiquated cases out of the way where I don’t hear or see them, and cannot justify buying the latest case when what I have work fine.
Just sayin’, if you have been building systems over decades like many of us have, how can you not have a spare usable case and need to buy one?
Anyway, at least I agree that the 5.25″ bay should continue to exist, because you can always adapt something smaller to fit into a larger bay but not the other way around. Heh, in one system I have a 4x SSD raid array in a 5.25″ bay, where I just took a couple pieces of plastic for side plates and put holes in for screws to hold the SSDs together as a unit. It didn’t even need to especially latch into the drive bay, just to sit there because SSDs don’t move around in use. In retrospect that was a waste of time, when I could have just duct taped them together. Just kidding.
Who out there is trying to claim that they need the latest case design for some legitimate reason? If you’re going for an o’c record and need water blocks, liquid nitrogen or similar, okay then, but for everyone else, how do you justify the waste of discarding ATX cases and continually buying new ones and pretending that is necessary?
I do realize everyone has a different situation, some people are selling their whole old systems so they need a new case, and some people are duped by marketing, and some just want the visual effect, but it strikes me as ironic that I so often see people who have philosophical problems with seeing *wires* because they want a clean looking setup, but then they want to see their case?
To me it has almost nothing to do with support of optical drives, rather it’s about ridiculous waste of existing cases that just happen to have the bays for them. Even some OEM case from the year 2000, it’s going to have a 5.25″ bay, and if it doesn’t have ample HDD bays, what does that really matter? Who is putting a boatload of 3.5″ HDDs in their extra fancy modern case where they’d want the 5.25″ instead of 3.5″ case rack space? As soon as I ask that, someone’s going to tell me that they do this, but that’s what a separate NAS box is for.
This is just one opinion. I’m good at fabricating what I need and some people aren’t set up for that, but in the back of my mind it seems more about ego, about creating something that looks pretty when I’d rather not have a lit up monolith in my eyesight at all. YMMV. [/rant]