Towers for me, in particular mid-towers; minis are a close second. Full towers, while very spacious, are rather heavy and cumbersome to handle, so I try to avoid them when possible.

Desktops are difficult to handle as well due to their design; some are very cramped, others are difficult when adding or replacing parts (extra braces or screws, parts stacked on top of each other). My uncle's Packard Bell was notorious in this regard - adding memory or cache chips meant taking the power supply out of the way (the sockets were underneath it). Not a fan of Pizzaboxes either - everything is very compressed and highly integrated.

Have not dealt with cubes, racks or other PC case styles.

While I like the look of the pizza boxes, they are a bitch to upgrade. I would say I probably prefer the mini towers, myself.
Hard to find them anymore, though (well, the "classic" look, at any rate). 2 5.25" bays and 2 3.5" bays are plenty, although if you're making a system with multiple floppy / media types for digital preservation, it is hard to beat a mid tower with additional bays (since, at minimum you would want a 5.25" 1.2mb floppy, a 3.5" 1.44mb floppy, a DVD/CD and maybe some other type of media in the remaining bay.

Desktop, then tower. I also tried pizzabox, but small coolers tend to be noisy.

Towers for me, but I am thinking of getting some of these:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php … d=2362&catid=29

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php … 2362&catid=1489

Those cube designs look interesting ratfink. Can you post a short review if you do get them?

Desktops: easy to stack. I have very limited desk space now.

Desktop for 486 and earlier, and midi tower for anything newer.

Mid or micro tower for ATX or micro ATX, but baby AT towers need to die for so often requiring the motherboard to be removed just to access the back of the drive cage. Mini-ITX cubes are meh.

I think Desktops are easier to work on, because the hood is on the upperside..

But i prefer little not to big tower.. Desktops takes a lot of room where its stands..

Full/Super Towers for me, generally the bigger the better.

Also like the Super Micro Entry Level chassis that can be converted into a 4U Rackmount as well.

I wish I had enough $$ to get at least 2 'pizzabox' style cases so that I can stack them up without taking up too much space for my earlier machines. I wouldn't need anything bigger to work with for them because I would only have 1xCD-ROM, 1xHDD (or CF to IDE), 1x5.25" FDD and 1x3.5" FDD for each. Also I would only have a maximum of 2 sound cards in these systems because I don't really have any fancy Roland cards to add to my SB or PAS card setup anyway. But alas, I don't have any pizzabox sytle cases, so I will use my full size ATX destop cases for all my builds except for my oldest where I will use a desktop case I got that has a turbo switch.

My planned builds:

1. for old XT system (oldest DOS games) - Old XT Desktop Case with turbo switch (I haven't found one yet 😒 )

2. for 386DX40 system (old DOS games) - Old AT Desktop Case with turbo switch:

For the rest of my systems, I'll use my large desktop ATX/AT cases [(I have 6 of these) (with 3x5.25"; 2x3.5" external drive bays and 3x3.5" internal bays! and 2x60mm exhaust fan openings). These are great AOpen cases with plenty of room to work for a desktop case]:

3. for 486 VLB system (old DOS games that can use a little more horsepower and win 3.11)
4. for P166MMX system (newer DOS GAMES and Win95)
5. for PII system (for newest DOS games and Win95)
6. for PIII system (for newest DOS games and Win98SE)
7. for P4 system (for old XP games and Win2000)

I have a few E-ATX boards so some full towers in use. I like full desktops as well for XT/AT machines but mostly I stick to mid towers.

Thin Mini-ITX is my latest project I'm having fun with. It's a new form factor Intel came out with that's just Mini-ITX with a reduced I/O panel height and a special slot cooler (Intel BXHTS1155LP) option. Working in a Lian Li PC-Q05. It's incomplete while I contemplate how to fit the DC power brick inside the case and when I don't have to work 7 days a week.

Desktops seem to fit the bill very well for classic PCs, especially for those XL and XXL sized ISA cards. Currently my LAPC-I and the full-sized CT2760 AWE32 reside in my desktop-cased 486.
Towers are OK too, but I don't like these cards hanging down due to gravity in them. (Well, some might argue that you can just lie these towers on their sides, but then the CD operations will be awkward. And it won't look....nice, either.)

For newer systems though, I prefer towers. And I prefer to tuck in the tower at the inner part of a table frame, away from my legs but near enough for the tip of my hands to reach for the CD drives and butttons.

I absolutely prefer towers, I really don't like desktops and especially I don't like non-standard stuff.
I prefer miditowers and a few minitowers but virtually all cases I have happen to be towers

Malik wrote:

Desktops seem to fit the bill very well for classic PCs, especially for those XL and XXL sized ISA cards. Currently my LAPC-I and the full-sized CT2760 AWE32 reside in my desktop-cased 486.
Towers are OK too, but I don't like these cards hanging down due to gravity in them. (Well, some might argue that you can just lie these towers on their sides, but then the CD operations will be awkward. And it won't look....nice, either.)

For newer systems though, I prefer towers. And I prefer to tuck in the tower at the inner part of a table frame, away from my legs but near enough for the tip of my hands to reach for the CD drives and butttons.

Word for word my exact reasoning.

With AT era desktop looks neater and takes less room, my 1st PC was a desktop and thought most desktops the height of 2 drives was really good looking
https://picasaweb.google.com/1019852149708365 … 395248815778930
(Not my pic I'll admit but mine is sitting in the garage of my parents place) if only it had a Mhz display and turbo button.
At the time I didn't like the limited space for hard drives but CF cards have fixed that now.
ATX desktops are still ok but that's when OEM's started using non generic parts which I'm not a fan of.

Anything Latter then P3 when heat started becoming a real problem I like towers. Full towers are sexy but not practical.

For work I like SFF as about the only upgrade they will ever get is RAM and maybe a video card

Back when I had 19" CRT monitors, and had to swap floppies/CDs all the time, I rather liked the desktop format. It was nice to keep the system under the monitor for that reason.

These days, I prefer to hide the computer away under the desk. I'm leaning more towards mini towers now. Mid towers leave undesired empty space. I've never liked the beast full towers. Just getting ribbon cables that could reach from the mobo to the drives was a pain.

Desktop and rack factor definitely, most ease of usage and compact. Tower follows because a cool tower is cool 🤣