What's a good case to replace my full-tower Addtronics 7896 / Supermicro 750

alkemyst

No Lifer
Feb 13, 2001
83,769
19
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I currently have this: http://www.addtronics.com/7896A.htm It's almost the same thing as the 7890/Supermicro 750 which were legendary almost in their "day". My case has served me since Celeron 300A days and possibly even before that.

The nice thing is in it's day it was huge and easy to work with. There are many cases in a smaller factor that give the equivalent room and are much easier to work with.

I'd love to have something the same dimensions and on casters if possible as the way I built my office is my PC is impossible to remove unless you disassemble it or the desk. It sits just low enough to be able to remove the casters, but that's difficult. I don't upgrade motherboards that often. I do swap CPUs and video/other cards a bit though.

This saved my butt about 5 years ago in a total home burglary (they almost even stole my lamps)...that said the main data I was preserving was totally wiped out during a Windows 8 install that formatted all drives instead of just the main one and made my backup unrecoverable (M$ was logged into my machine for a week and had no luck nor could explain what went wrong).

Money is not so much the object (I am not going to spend $1000+ though unless there is an ungodly reason to do so).

I want good air cooling as I do overclock whether or not it really matters just because it's fun and water piping just adds potential drama I don't want to worry about (I am open to things like the Corsair H100 types for my CPU).

I'd like quiet.

I'd like easy maintenance (dust/positive pressure).

USB 3.0 on the front panel (just a single port would be fine).

I run dual optical drives not much else external.

I want to run 4-5 drives internally...2 would be SSD.

I like tool-less, but don't want to give up build quality.

My desk is 3' deep and I can use almost all that depth for the case underneath it.

I liked the Haf-X a bit when I worked with one for my dad.

I don't need windows, don't care for LED lights...big quiet fans are awesome, I modded my case heavily for this in the past when only 80mm were really available over 60mm. Today 120mm or better make more sense.