Has anybody had a look at the Ghost S1 mini ITX case that is in development from a new Swedish startup.... https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/louqe/ghost-s1-mkii Not wanting to be lazy but its like the love child of the Dan Case and N case and seems to have so much thought put into its construction this could be the mini itx case to get next year. Looks stunning (especially the white one)!
I've been keeping an eye on it over on [H] and it does look promising. It's not for me, though, because I'm very happy with my M1, but I do like what they are doing.
Looks interesting, but I already have both the Dan case and n case. Nothing special enough for me to make me want to purchase
I do think that one of the issues being faced by all of these new mITX cases is that a lot of potential buyers will already have a boutique mITX case that they're probably very happy with, and there are only so many $200 mITX boxes any one person will buy. The market is pretty saturated so new cases need to offer something specific and novel to be attractive, and a lot of them are just refining or tweaking existing designs.
It'll be interesting to see; saturation will kick in at some point, or ideas will be adopted by mainstream case makers and affect the market that way. As well as [H], I'm on SFF a fair bit, and they have interesting content in that area. Personally, I'm more interested in the new Dan Case concept, the C4-SFX, which has a bit more room and flexibility than the A4. Having never seen an NCase M1, it's hard to see how they all measure up; the M1 is one to beat in terms of quality and flexibility IMHO. The 3 slot design adds little to the size, but opens up other options like the 'narrow' (2 DIMM slot) mATX cases that are usually low end. Having held back for 6 months or so, as recommended; Loque have built interest and got it right, by the look of how quickly it was funded ~2 days. Good luck to them, it's a clever concept and well made case; especially with the magnetic Top Hat extenders. *Edit* I deem to have stepped into the unofficial Bit-Tech NCase M1 fan club
I love my M1 but it isn't a perfect case - the airflow at the bottom of the case isn't particularly great, and there's not quite enough space for bottom-mounted fans to work truly effectively to cool a toasty GPU, for example. Also, the open design (lots of venting on all panels bar the front) means that it's a bit noisier than I'd like ideally. But it does do a lot of things well and is a pleasure to build in, and you can pack a seriously amount of hardware into a compact volume. The thing is that there is definitely room for improvement in pretty much all of the existing cases out there, because everyone has slightly different requirements and uses said cases slightly differently. The flipside of that is that minor tweaks on existing concepts is a hard sell and I've definitely noticed an increasing number of complaints of people "ripping off" other folks' designs (although tbf these complaints don't tend to come from the case designers but from their vocal supporters).
That's all true, and I agree all round. After all, there are only so many ways you can configure a case with or without outside 'inspiration'. Really, after the SG05/06, the M1 really is next real icebreaker in terms of pushing the boundaries of what can be crammed in a small space with some comfort - NCase have a lot to be proud of and have driven the market forward considerably. I was sad to see the NCase Sidearm get shelved, and hope they can get a second product on the market soon. Similarly, it's great that the Cerberus/X has been able to get on the market, especially with Aibohphobia's absence (Get well soon, James), from the final development and production process. I think the creation of SFFLAB is good news too, in terms of market access and distribution for boutique cases.
