I just did, works fine and I used a Fractal Design case and water cooling on an AMD R7 1700. I overclocked it a bit and it works great, it sits on my desk but yeah it could easily fit in a closet. Downside: it's a bit cumbersome and clumsy to move but I don"t plan on moving it much.
Simples said: Anyone build a gaming rig with a cube tower? My system is in the closet. I have to open the bi-fold doors to access my puter. I'm wondering if a cube tower will work well in that space. I'm also wondering if they are easy to move around. There are times I take my machine into the living room and hook it up to the tv and that's a lot of work with the full tower I have now. Any thoughts?
I built a destkop PC that also lives in a cabinet. The case I chose works perfectly as far as setting up the components (the radiator for the CPU watercooler is quite snug, but it fit!). I went for water cooling because I suspected it might get quite hot - how hot will depend on your choice of CPU and GPU, but cabinets aren't the best thing for ventilation. I also chose to mount the fans to pull in air from the back/sides and out through the front, and leave the cabinet door part open when using the computer, so that it won't be recirculating as much hot air.
This is my current case (Cooler Master HAF XB Evo):
And this is the one it replaced (Nox Live HTPC case), as it was nearing 10 years old. It was initially standing on a small table in the living room and I really liked how it looked out in the open, but it was much tighter than my current one - no chance of getting a high-end GPU in there because the PSU limited the lenght of any PCIe card to about 20 cm.
As for moving it around, it's a desktop case. Not really much difference IMO between this and a full tower - still need to disconnect a bunch of cables and lug it around. Unless by a cube case you mean something really small, mini-ITX form factor and such. If so, I don't have any experience in those, but they don't really appeal to me anyway because of space restrictions for internal drives, GPUs, etc.
I have always gotten full towers - for cooling not expandability - and since space isn't an issue.
My next one is unlikely to be larger than a mini-tower I just don't see that much benefit any more.
Even a really small and somewhat portable machine like Falcon Northwest's Fragbook supposedly is about as good as a full tower though obviously with less expandability and a more limited choice of componants. I won't go that small though since I don't need the space and rarely travel any more.
dorotea said:I have always gotten full towers - for cooling not expandability - and since space isn't an issue.
My next one is unlikely to be larger than a mini-tower I just don't see that much benefit any more.
Even a really small and somewhat portable machine like Falcon Northwest's Fragbook supposedly is about as good as a full tower though obviously with less expandability and a more limited choice of componants. I won't go that small though since I don't need the space and rarely travel any more.
One of the reasons I went for full tower is that both my video card and my CPU cooler have radiators (liquid cooled), so I needed the vent space to mount them. The video card uses a single 140mm fan radiator and the CPU cooler uses a dual 140mm fan radiator.
One thing I just ordered was a single stand that can hold my two 27" monitors. Having two individual stands eats a surprising amount of desk space.