Did you pull it out of the trash? You seem to be really averse to spending money on anything PC related.
I have a Cooler Master HAF 932 Advanced. It's huge. It's like a wind tunnel. No shortage of air. The only negative I can think of about it is that you have to clean it more often, as lots of dust gets in there because it's so open. It looked like a shrew had got caught and disintegrated between my CPU heatsink and the fan I have attached to it. I clean it more often now of course. 6 to 8 month intervals seem to be too long. I usually am poking around in there within that span of time anyway, so I just give it a good blast of air each time I do anything to it. I should also add that I nearly punched someone in the face who started to set a drink on top of my case. Had it spilled, it would have spilled right onto the key components and led to ultraviolence.
Sorry about the shittiness of my cell phone camera. Seriously, cleanest cable management ever. And that's a non-modular power supply. The hatch thing on the top is an e-sata rig they've set up. You can just drop any sata drive you have in there.
If I'm spending over 100 bucks for a case I'm keeping it for at least 7 years. 20 bucks a case for a yearly build sounds about right (or 60 bucks every 3 years which is more likely the case).
This is replacing a case I bought back in 2005. The original Antec P180 really is that old, as crazy as it sounds, and was also over $100 when I bought it. The P180 was great back in its day. And I used it with both my Pentium 4 and Core 2. But it's really old and worn out now, and I'm missing parts for it. I lost all of the HDD and optical drive mounting stuff, and on the P180, it's all weird and proprietary. It uses sound dampening grommets and special extra long screws that go through the grommets. Normal computer case stuff doesn't work with it. The plastic tabs that hold the side panels and the front door on also broke off. I got a lot of of use out of it, and it was time to move on to a new case. 7 or 8 years is a long life for a computer case. This is why Khaid and I are saying high-end cases make sense. You can buy a cheap, crappy case that will be worn out in a couple of years for $50-60, or you can spend over $100 and get the better part of a decade out of a case.
1. It's full of fans. Those only last so long before they die, or get really loud. I've had this case 7 years now. The case sounds like a jet turbine when I turn it on. 2. I've moved several times. My case got smashed during one of the moves and has huge dents in one of the side panels. I also lost all of the accessories for the case in the move. We're pretty sure those movers stole things from us as a digital camera and a few other things got stolen. While no one is going to steal case accessories, I think they were in a box of electronics that also had the digital camera in it. Antec no longer sells accessories for the P180. It's too old. Without that kit, I can't install any new hard drives or optical drives. The P180 uses non-standard, proprietary mounting stuff designed to minimize noise. 3. The side panels and front door on the P180 use cheap plastic hinges, despite the rest of the case being metal. These broke off, and now the sides bulge, and the front panel is held on with parts of paper clips that I hammered into the plastic (ghetto I know). 4. The P180 is outdated in some ways. It puts the power supply in a cramped, sealed off metal compartment at the bottom, which makes cable management a real chore. It also makes no sense with modern power supplies that have 120mm fans that vent out the top. You're just going to cook your power supply in that thing. The compartment was designed for older, 2005 and prior, style power supplies that had 80mm fans venting out the back. 5. My old power supply had really short cables, and I actually had to drill a hole in my motherboard tray and route the CPU cable through the back. This isn't necessary with my new power supply which has longer cables, and I still have a huge, ghetto looking hole drilled through the motherboard tray which I sealed with duct tape. So basically my case has a huge dent in the side, the side panels bulge, it's held together by duct tape and paper clips, and it sounds like a jet turbine because the fans are 7 years old. It was time to get a new case. It just took me awhile to find one I really liked. Also, I know you're just being a sarcastic asshat who wants to troll and thread shit.
I've moved onto bootcut nowadays. Less extreme but still a pleasant amount of ankle freedom @ monkey my xbox hasn't had any of those problems!
All this pc elitist talk and it sounds like your pc is on its last legs. Or at least a load of parts are. ghetto ain't the word.
Just the case. Like I said, that was a leftover from my Pentium 4 Northwood system. Before that I had a Lian Li with really loud fans, so I moved my P4 into the P180 which was advertised as a quiet case. The Antec P180 is not a crappy case by any means. It's just old. A lot of the aspects of its design that were groundbreaking in its day, like mounting the power supply on the bottom and using sound dampening materials, are now standard on most PC cases. Also, I don't understand why console gamers are coming into PC threads and shitting on them. I don't go into your crappy playstation threads and start posting stupid shit. You don't get why PC gamers spend money on expensive hardware. We get it. But I bet you guys spend just as much or more on expensive TVs and receivers.
When we say a case getting worn, it's just old. These things are made of stainless steel. Well some cases are aluminum, but I'm almost positive Antec still only makes stainless steel cases. They're definitely not going to collapse into themselves and make a black hole or anything. Like cmdr, I also still own an old Antec case back when I switched to Pentium 4 Northwood. IIRC, it was an Antec Performance Plus 1080AMG SOHO File server tower. I could still whip it out and use it now, but it'll just be frustrating to work with. With cases, they get built better, especially on the inside with better air flow, cable management, spacing, sound dampening, etc.
Seriously. Only someone who has never built a PC would think a case is just a metal black box. There are huge advances every few years in cooling, noise reduction, and ease of use, to the point where if you do a lot of tinkering with your PC, it might be worth it to upgrade your case. Also, PC components change. Take SSDs. Those didn't even exist yet when the P180 came out. But newer cases make mounting an SSD easy. The design of power supplies has changed. The fans used to be on the back, they were mounted at the top of the case; and now the fans are on the top and they're mounted on the bottom, which totally alters case design and how cooling is done. Also, video cards have gotten gigantic compared to what was around a few years ago. Compare a GTX 680 from 2012 to a Geforce 6800 Ultra from 2004 for instance. Massive difference in size. And newer cases are designed to accommodate those bigger video cards.
I still have my old aluminum Wavemaster. Someday I'm going to polish it up like this guy did. Someday.
I have a case in the loft somewhere similar to that, the wave fronts seemed all the rage 5 or 6 years ago. Before that it was the coloured acrylic ones, a real nightmare as you could see everything and it had to be spotless inside. Mounting bits in them was a bit horrible too