Computer tips (from an Asian)

it'll be a while before another package form newegg reaches me so i'm gonna do a quick post about computer cases

there a 3 basic sizes: mini tower, mid tower, and full tower

Mini Tower: used primarily for lower end home computers, they tend to have only one drive bay for a disk drive and one of a hard drive. they are compact enough to fit in/on just about any desk. lacking in size means they don't have the space to install a full size GPU, and are limited to low profile cards that lack power.
the biggest drawback to mini tower is that they only support micro-ATX Motherboards, which have fewer PCI-e slots, sata ports and fewer RAM card slots.

mini tower dwarfed by the monitor

there are some enthusiast mini towers, have the motherboard flat against the bottom of the case, commonly called "LAN Boxes" they offer the gamer-on-the-go a convenient way to transport his rig to and from LAN parties.
Having the motherboard horizontal rather than vertical LAN boxes allow the case to be built taller allowing for full sized graphics cards and heat sinks to be installed

Example: Thermaltake LANbox

LANbox next to normal mini tower

Mid Tower: the industry standard, vary in size to accommodate most motherboard sizes.
available in just about every design imaginable there is bound to be a case for just about everyone and many have space for SLI or crossfire.
now some mid towers lack the space for things like liquid cooling and massive air coolers like the coolermaster V8 for example but they offer a great amount of flexibility to just about everyone.

one of the many styles of mid towers

offers goo airflow and an interesting design

this is the Antec LanBoy air this is the exact case that i'm using for my desktop
it supports up to 3-way SLI

and up to 15 fans

Full Tower: then there are full towers, these are the biggest baddest cases out there,space for 8 HDD 5 external drive bays eATX or even HPTX motherboards, these cases are huge and have space to spare for liquid cooling or that huge heatsink. the only draw back for many of these cases is price upwards of $500 but if you've got the money, why not, right?

a more extreme design for a tower this goes with a more modular design

this should give you a rough idea the sizes were talking about

3-way SLI with room to spare

Then there is this....Thing

it's like 2 full towers welded together

this thing is massive

it has 18 external drive bays

thats room for about 24 hard drives

well what ever you get just remember to pick based on what you want in the end