Och
ATI Champion
So this is just me ranting, but hear me out.
The standard enthusiast form factor is still ATX board inside ATX mid tower case. And unless someone is doing SLI/Crossfire and a crazy custom water cooling solution, it's just a giant waste of space, PCI slots, and loss of any kind of portability. These archaic ATX boards were designed to accommodate a bunch of cards, and the cases were designed to accommodate a bunch of CD and HDD drives. For 99% of users, these PCI and drive slots are going to stay empty.
Then there is the whole small form factor craze, but it is geared towards Mini ITX boards. These builds, while small, often end up being noisy and there is no room for expansion whatsoever, for instance you can't have an internal sound card since there is only one PCI-E slot, just for the GPU.
Enter the Micro ATX, which is supposed to be the middle ground. Smaller boards, but still with a total of 3 or 4 PCI-E slots, so you can have a GPU and a soundcard, and even a SLI setup with a sound card. Yet, if you look at Micro ATX cases from mainstream manufacturers, they are much larger than they need to be, bloated with provisions for archaic devices such as HDD and CD-ROMs.
A well designed mATX case does not have to be much larger than a typical mITX case, while being a lot more versatile. The smallest mATX case I was able to find is Sliger Cerberus, which is very little known. And even then it could be made 2-3" thinner, if you look at the photo of the back panel where the cards end, there is extra thickness added for god knows what reason. But at least it doesn't waste space for legacy stuff that nobody will ever use.
Pictures below is my Sliger Cerberus mATX compared to my daughters Phanteks Enthoo Evolv ATX mid tower. And the difference in weight and portability is even greater.
The standard enthusiast form factor is still ATX board inside ATX mid tower case. And unless someone is doing SLI/Crossfire and a crazy custom water cooling solution, it's just a giant waste of space, PCI slots, and loss of any kind of portability. These archaic ATX boards were designed to accommodate a bunch of cards, and the cases were designed to accommodate a bunch of CD and HDD drives. For 99% of users, these PCI and drive slots are going to stay empty.
Then there is the whole small form factor craze, but it is geared towards Mini ITX boards. These builds, while small, often end up being noisy and there is no room for expansion whatsoever, for instance you can't have an internal sound card since there is only one PCI-E slot, just for the GPU.
Enter the Micro ATX, which is supposed to be the middle ground. Smaller boards, but still with a total of 3 or 4 PCI-E slots, so you can have a GPU and a soundcard, and even a SLI setup with a sound card. Yet, if you look at Micro ATX cases from mainstream manufacturers, they are much larger than they need to be, bloated with provisions for archaic devices such as HDD and CD-ROMs.
A well designed mATX case does not have to be much larger than a typical mITX case, while being a lot more versatile. The smallest mATX case I was able to find is Sliger Cerberus, which is very little known. And even then it could be made 2-3" thinner, if you look at the photo of the back panel where the cards end, there is extra thickness added for god knows what reason. But at least it doesn't waste space for legacy stuff that nobody will ever use.
Pictures below is my Sliger Cerberus mATX compared to my daughters Phanteks Enthoo Evolv ATX mid tower. And the difference in weight and portability is even greater.
