Blogs Case and motherboard manufacturers need to keep up with storage

Totally in agreement regarding the number of M.2 ports on motherboards. How is it the case that I get 1 PCIe and 1 SATA port on my cheap ASRock B350 motherboard (mATX, even!), while considerably more expensive models only get a single PCIe one?

The STX DeskMini machines have 3 PCIe ports on their teeny tiny motherboards - that's how it should be done!

 

I couldn't agree with you more on all the points you've raised Antony, The lack of innovation with case design of late irks me no end - I'd dearly love for Silverstone to revisit the TJ07 minus the 5 and a quarter bays, a through and through chamber still on the base, more high airflow options for the main chamber, cable routing space behind the motherboard tray, provisions for modern storage devices and it's trademark curves = win in my book

 

The last case I had that used actual screws to secure a drive to the case was from my first computer in 1998. Everything else has either used clips of some description or a flexible tray with those rubber grommeted non screws that take no time at all to install. The case mounting part of this article is frankly a non-issue unless you thoroughly review cases for a living and even then not really.

 

That would get my money...
the TJ07 is a legend, and still highly valued today, but they are a little antiquated in its features

 

I'll go there, I'm a bit bored of the TJ07 now. Don't really see how bringing it back is remotely innovation for any of the reasons listed above.

Agree on basically all the points in the article though Antony, some things are most definitely moving backwards. I was in the middle of typing up what I'd like to see in cases when I realised most things are present somewhere at least, may as well just eat the words before I write them it seems.

It would be nice if NVMe storage just got a move on and continued to fall in price a bit more. It's at a doable level now, but a little bit more and it'll be firmly in the advisable category.

 

JUST RE-BUILD THE WAVEMASTER WITH 120MM FANS ALREADY.

Jeeeeeeze.

 

That's like saying I'm bored of the E Type Jag...

The TJ07 has character ie it's not a featureless square box with tempered glass festooned to every surface, rather it has flowing curves and presence, it's a design that works so so well and infinitely moddable - it just needs to be rehashed.

 

I thought it being a relatively featureless square [ish] box was precisely what made it so popular... 'blank canvas' and all that...

 

It'd be nice if the speed benefits of NVMe storage could be felt in anything but benchmarks first.

A GPU 3x faster than your current one provides a huge FPS upgrade, a CPU with 3x as many cores would open up a whole suite of aplications and uses

A PCI-E SSD with 3x the bandwitdh of a SATA-III 850 PRO? Nothing tangible. We've been told for years now "storage is the last bottleneck of modern systems", but that didnt seem to the case when I had a 850 PRO and 960 PRO in the same system..

 

Any board manufacturers been brave enough to drop SATA entirely yet?

M.2 seems so much faster and more convenient to me. If you need a big data drive there is always USB3.0 and Ethernet.

 

It was rehashed, it's called the TJ11.

The TJ07 is just a box with two rounded corners, it has a radiator space in the bottom and is screwed together but that's about it. Anything is infinitely moddable, easy mods in a TJ07 don't magically look great just because of the case, all the great examples of modded TJ07 you'll find have so much work put into them. A lot of the recent fantastic mods out there have been inspired by the TJ07, but really they're quite far removed and superior.

 

Which is a piece of overpriced shite in all fairness and it still retains much of what was bad about the TJ07 ie all the unnecessary 5 and a quarter bays etc etc etc.

Which when you put it in that context means every other case is just a samey samey black or white box, some of which have glass bolted to them - my point is simply cases are pretty much the same these days, just different brands or rebrands with no individual character and lacking in innovation.

Whilst it might offend some to say it, not everyone want's to mod a case, chooses not to or even has the time to etc etc, some people are just hardware enthusiasts and couldn't care less what the insides look like - with reference to what constitutes a case mod these days, well that's an ongoing argument and endless debate isn't it lol.

They were scratch builds if my memory serves correctly, so therefore not case mods.

 

u.2 SSDs would remove the heat issues (but no one makes them) even thought my last to motherboards have had the ports

 

IIRC Intel do but they're expensive/enterprise offerings [they're basically 2.5" housed versions of intel's AIC SSDs from what I can see]

Until/unless stuff like Oculink takes off and/or PCs move away from the ATX spec, we probably won't see any radical changes to motherboard and case design any time soon [imo].

 

I'd add a paragraph on 'ITX' cases that are larger than ATX case. That's just moronic. When it is possible to make a 19.5L ATX case that can handle a monstrous build and your 'ITX' case is 47L, you should be embarrassed.

A word of warning on m.2 heatsinks: put them on the controller if you're going to be running 24/7 high-QD benchmarks or continuous full-bandwidth read/writes, but do not put them on the NAND. Like other electrochemical and electromechanical devices, operating temperature is critical, and lower is NOT always better. Generally design temperature is intended to be above any reasonable ambient temperature, because it is far easier to heat a chip up to temperature than to actively cool it (this is why high grade MEMS IMUs heat themselves up to operating temperature before they give stable and accurate readings). NAND that is warmed up to operating temperature will be faster and more efficient because less energy is being used during the write/erase processes (long-term stability is not a concern because once you power off the device, the die will cool very rapidly), and will have a higher endurance (due to the lower power writes/erases causing less depletion of the oxide layer). But by actively cooling the NAND the drive will waste energy continually trying to heat up chips that then just sink that heat into a heatsink.
For the most part ssd heatsinks are just as pointless as RAMsinks, a cosmetic addition rather than a functional one outside of benchmarking.

 

While it would be stupid to drop SATA from the entire lineup I don't see any harm in putting out one or two models without it, for example MSI has released 131 socket 1151 boards already (not counting stuff only available in specific markets or OEM stuff), so would it really matter if it was 133 instead?

 

A case is more than just being efficiency space wise, people care how things look. Maybe you've already got a mitx setup but want something that looks different and that case tickles your fancy?

You're not being forced to buy one if you don't like it