Enclosure Cryorig's 2016 mITX cases

[TheInternal]

Apple's trashcan style did come across as being based on (what sounded like) reasonable engineering concepts. I'm leaning towards the slightly negative side of neutral when it comes to the aesthetics of that style, but do welcome the space saving and efficiency such a design offers.

Though I love the aesthetics of the Taku (a nod to "otaku?"), I do find it a bit frustrating that an entire group of folks who want small quiet systems continues to be mostly overlooked... aka the high end gamers, VR enthusiasts, and media producers who need large top-end cards. Both the Taku and the Lian-Li PC-Q19 are gorgous boxes, but with neither of them being just a little longer / there being a variant that's just a bit longer, it continues to pigeonhole many folks into having to either compromise on their GPU or get a less attractive / much larger case.

 

[Necere]

Though I love the aesthetics of the Taku (a node to "otaku?"), I do find it a bit frustrating that an entire group of folks who want small quiet systems continues to be mostly overlooked... aka the high end gamers, VR enthusiasts, and media producers who need large top-end cards. Both the Taku and the Lian-Li PC-Q19 are gorgous boxes, but with neither of them being just a little longer / there being a variant that's just a bit longer, it continues to pigeonhole many folks into having to either compromise on their GPU or get a less attractive / much larger case.

Small, quiet, high performance. Choose any two.

That's usually the case, anyway. One of my objectives with the M1 was to make it possible to achieve a good balance between these three competing goals, and for the most part I think it has succeeded at that. It may not be as small as some other cases, or as quiet, or as capable of housing the absolute most powerful hardware, but I think it's one of the very few cases that can do all three reasonably well. It does require some research and work to really make the most of though.

The constraints of the Taku's (and slim cases in general) size and shape don't lend themselves to hitting more than 2 out of 3 of these points well. Even if it could fit full-length GPUs, it's either going to overheat or be too noisy. For high performance parts, you need robust cooling - which means large heatsinks and good airflow. The narrow chassis precludes larger CPU heatsinks, while making airflow highly obstructed, at best. The end result is you need faster spinning fans for adequate cooling, and that's going to drive up the noise level.

In general, "shoebox" or small tower cases perform better than slim cases will, but you'll almost always find them lacking in some category. Compromise is the name of the game with SFF - it's just about choosing which ones you can live with.

 

[TheInternal]

As I've continued to poke around tonight, I've been pleasantly surprised to see folks active in creating new cases to fill those gaps in the market on this forum. That's pretty darn awesome. If not for encountering this site, I'm not sure I'd hear of the NCASE M1 or the Cerberus... both interesting options.

 

[confusis]

I have newsposted these cases

Read more here.

 

[Necere]

Techpowerup has a shot of the Taku's internal chassis by itself. It's got wheels for the slide out mechanism.

 

[confusis]

Ball bearing wheels by the looks. Niiiice

 

[iFreilicht]

That looks like really high quality, but seeing this I'm even less hopeful on good ventilation. Right now there's no way for open air GPUs (which all ITX GPUs are) to exhaust except for the back. With the R9 Nano they show built in there, half of the exhaust is going towards the front. I'm very interested to see how they'll be fixing that or whether this will be "function follows form".

 

[Phuncz]

I like the TAKU and OLA more and more every day. They are focusing on build quality for the OLA and the TAKU also seems to go that way. All them cases are making me poor !

 

[TheInternal]

Based on the techpowerup shot, it the Taku looks very suitable for a full sized GPU, 2.5", and 3.5" drives... assuming the ventilation isn't an issue.

 

[Phuncz]

Don't you mean the OLA, since the TAKU (monitor stand case) doesn't fit fullsize GPUs ?

In the OLA it's less of an issue than many will perceive it to be, because that 140mm fan is going to be just sucking air out of a tube, with no air hanging around. The concept is a sound design but it all depends on the performance of the fan. Let's also not forget the case is useless if you can't find a suitable replacement fan when it eventually keels over.

 

[iFreilicht]

You're talking about the OLA, not the TAKU, right?

 

[Phuncz]

Yep, the OLA, but I seem to have caused some confusion and I edited my post.

 

[Tek Everything]

The OLA looks sickkkkkkk... need it

 

[Curiosity]

I'm not sure if he's just a small person or not, but in cryorig's booth timelapse the taku looks pretty big.

 

[Phuncz]

The TAKU is pretty big, it's basically PSU - GPU - motherboard, all next to eachother. But it isn't as deep as you'd expect, which helps. In the video TekEverything posted @2:40 you can see how a full ISO layout keyboard fits beneath it, so you can get a better handle on the scale of this thing.

 

[jeshikat]

It's 20L: W567 x H134.8 x D270 mm

 

[iFreilicht]

It's 20L: W567 x H134.8 x D270 mm

Including the feet, though, which in this case makes up for close to half the volume. So the actual part-housing is somewhere between 9 and 12L. Still way too large for the hardware you can fit, but I think the way it works as a stand makes up for that. The footprint is effectively 0cm².

 

[veryrarium]

I'm looking at the spec of OLA and rewatched COMPUTEX videos that show OLA in them, and wondering why there's 21mm of difference between the width 226mm and the depth 205mm as the enclosure looks like a perfect circle when viewed along the z-axis, with no protrusion in any directions in the x-y plane.

And what's the convention when people talk about the volume of a non-cuboidal enclosure like this, do people just calculate DxWxH as the smallest cuboid circumscribing the enclosure? (I hate it when a forum software automatically converts 'x' followed by 'D' into a smiley emticon.)

 

[Phuncz]

It's those side flaps most likely:

 

[iFreilicht]

And what's the convention when people talk about the volume of a non-cuboidal enclosure like this

There's none, but I think for simple geometrical shapes (like cylinders or pyramids) you could argue that not a cuboid be used for volume calculation.