laxdragon wrote:

I've never liked the beast full towers. Just getting ribbon cables that could reach from the mobo to the drives was a pain.

Some of those huge towers are just great though if you have the space. There's nothing like a 10-5.25"bay beige monster to impress your friends with 🤣 I've seen some beauties here on vogons (especially the ones with LCD turbo readouts ....sometimes it's worth the extra effort to get some longer IDE ribbon cables or extension cables.

Full towers hands down (aluminum when possible). I agree with the points on working on pizza boxes and desktops - the loud fans is usually what seals it for me. Used to go caseless but that's a whole'nother bucket of worms when you have to transport the machine or have guests/children/dogs/generally any other living organism need to use the room, and so on. 😒

I've looked at cube cases over the years - usually they have some awkward wire management design or most of the bulk/volume is there to accept outrageous water cooling systems (you know, setups with 2-3-4 radiators that carry 2-3-4 fans a piece); cool in concept, but some of them tend to be just as cramped as a conventional mid-tower or desktop to work on. 😮

I've looked at the Corsair and Cooler Master linked in the past - haven't had hands-on with either; the Corsair looks more promising.

Finally, going in a completely opposite direction, all-in-ones have always been fascinating to me - like the original Macintosh, but modern all-in-ones are usually so limited in terms of performance or features that it isn't worth the hassle. 😵

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Thin old desktops (1-2 expansion slots, 1 odd, 1 fdd, 1 hdd) ~middle 90's.
aaaand thin mini-ITX for today's PCs.