You can’t have a PC without a case. The trouble is that cases are one of the first places resellers sacrifice quality in order to bring down system costs. From an end-user perspective, this might seem to make sense. After all, the case appears to exist in order to hold components in place and put a pretty face on a bunch of fans and circuit boards. So long as a chassis sports a sufficient number of drive bays and isn’t blatantly ugly, it’s generally good enough to use as the default case for most systems.

There are two problems with this view. First, growing complacent with a rock bottom cost case encourages salespeople to ignore cases as an easy and lucrative upsell opportunity. Second, cheap cases and power supplies can come back to bite you in the long run. In the time it takes you to diagnose and RMA a blown capacitor in a power supply, you’ve lost your profit on that component to your tech’s time and shipping costs. And what of the infamously sporadic, case-related tech issues that crop up? Without the cover on, the system works fine. With the cover on, or perhaps with a book resting on top of the chassis, the PC is dead. Welcome to the world of short circuits brought on by poor design and difficult assembly methods, problems that we’ve seen take days for good techs to troubleshoot.

“Before we even go to the manufacturing stage,” says AOpen product manager Anthony Ma, “we have a couple of software systems that take our drawings and variable input to simulate things like a drop test from a certain height or how it will bend a certain way so that we can guess how it will hold up after being shipped. Or we can simulate pressure, such as from putting a heavy monitor on top of the chassis. A lot of people focus on the aesthetics of the thing, but we run through all the simulations and fix all the structural problems before we even get to that point. I mean, nobody cares what a case looks like when it doesn’t work.”
But let’s imagine that even lame $30 mini towers never failed. Would this be OK to make as the foundation of your product line? Perhaps for your value machines, the ones that have to compete against the tier-one OEMs. But you’re only going to make $50 to $100 on these boxes, anyway, and a cheap case won’t help to build your business. When you sell a PC in a $30 case to Johnny and Johnny’s friend comes over to hang out, your system won’t catch the friend’s eye. (“Nice video card,” says Johnny’s friend, “but your box kinda bites, dude.”) The days of beige are over, and a bland chassis may even do more to harm word-of-mouth marketing for your store than help it.

This isn’t to say that you should only adopt cases on the basis of flash and dazzle. Many buying groups, including corporate accounts, have different priorities, including size, ease of maintenance, and noise output. The point is that there is no one-case-fits-all solution. That said, a case can make or break not only a sale but also your accessibility to an entire consumer segment. Value-add chassis can increase per-system margin, drop your service costs, and help increase front-end sales numbers. The trick is knowing which qualities to look for and what trends will be influencing your customers’ decisions.

Customers Love: Bling-Bling
As Antec’s Scott Richards points out in this issue’s up-close interview, flash and pizzazz in the chassis isn’t just for gamers anymore. Interesting chasses might appeal to kids, for example. No, we don’t mean the Barbie and Hot Wheels designs, although those are valid (if unsuccessful) options. It might be something more like Lian-Li’s PC-6010, which on top of having multi-colored front panel LEDs features a see-through “aquarium” side panel. The thin, decorated Plexiglas chamber is mostly filled with water and a handful of plastic fish that bob around on currents pumped through the liquid. Silly, perhaps, but great for hours of juvenile entertainment.
Corporate boxes can be more of a challenge to make visually intriguing without being distracting or obnoxious. Models such as Antec’s SLK1600, for example, are a basic, beige mini tower design but still offer a bit of front panel styling. A great corporate box that still grabs attention with its smooth lines and tasteful use of front panel illumination is Athenatech’s (www.athenatech.us) A1000SC. Small enough to qualify as a small form factor box, this microATX/Flex ATX chassis uses stands to orient either vertically or horizontally. The box holds four drives, four expansion slots, a distinctive, LED-lit line across the fascia, and can be modified with customized colors and/or panels for volume orders.

Of course, gamers remain one of the most lucrative niches in the desktop market, and probably one of the top examples of a gaming tower is Thermaltake’s (www.thermaltake.com) Xaser III VM3000 Skull. Named for the blinking skulls with red-lit eyes on the front panel, this screwless chassis is loaded with ventilation features, solid steel construction, oversized side panel window, and a 5.25” bay Hardcano fan and temperature control device.
In a similar but even more reseller-friendly vein, check out CasEdge’s (www.casedge.com) Diabolic series Minotaur mid tower. This 10-bay stunner features a front panel fashioned after the legendary Minotaur of Knossos. The mouth is an external air intake vent. Ear-like lines slash across the side panels, one of which juts across the clear side panel. The eyes glow a menacing red, horns run up the corners of the fascia, and the colored paneling on the front is available in red, purple, yellow, or blue. (Red is far and away our favorite.)
What separates CasEdge from the plethora of manufacturers making eccentric, gamer-focused chasses is its attention to detail and system builder-friendly construction. While you might know the name CasEdge, which is a division of Foxconn, the company is actually the largest chassis manufacturer in the world. CasEdge knows what the market needs and stays hard at work providing innovative features for demanding audiences.

“Our primary value proposition is very easy, low labor assembly,” says CasEdge’s Ed Leckliter, director of channel products. “Think about what a system builder usually has to go through. They have to put a power supply in. With us, it’s already included and assembled, so that’s not an issue. When I build a system, I usually put the motherboard in before any of the drives because the drives get in the way. So not only do we have a motherboard tray with a handle you slip your fingers under, lift up, and slip back to remove, but when you remove the tray normally you’d have to screw in a bunch of standoffs so you can get everything positioned right. Wrong! Our standoffs are already in place. Just position the board over the standoffs, press down, and these three compressed, x-slot standoffs go through the openings and pop into place. The other six holes, depending on the chassis, pop into place next. In about 15 seconds, I’ve got the motherboard installed in the tray and another five seconds to put the tray back in the unit.

“Then you go to the drives,” he adds. “We use honest to God snap rails. I don’t mean where you’ve got four screws to put in two rails before you can slide and snap it into place. No, I mean you’ve got sheet metal with a bend on the end that looks like rails except with sheet metal protrusions. You put the rear one in, slightly bow the rail, put the other stud going into the second hole in the side of the drive, and it’s attached. Do the same on the other side, slide the drive in, and it snaps into place. Bang, done, no screws involved at all, at it takes about two seconds on each side.”
When cosmetics matter more than anything else and your customer is willing to pay for extra assembly time, our favorite case for a full-on “wow effect” is the Acryclear II from Aerocool (www.aerocool.us). Unlike most acrylic cases, the Acryclear II uses a two-tone, clear/blue design reminiscent of either a water wave or a yin-yang symbol. The company thoughtfully bundles in a set of gloves so that builders aren’t faced with a long fingerprint search once the system is finished. The box provides 10 bays and accommodates up to five 80mm case fans. (We recommend using fans with blue LEDs.) Yes, the case is time intensive to assemble because it comes as little more than an empty, transparent shell, but the end results are worth the effort, especially if you can use a smaller motherboard, rounded cables, and the like. Also be sure to upsell customers on the company’s AcryShield, a three-sided panel with colored, acrylic sides that replaces the housing on the user’s ATX power supply. For LED-equipped PSUs, the AcryShield practically sells itself.

Of course, hot looks don’t have to be all about LEDs and fancy window cut-outs. Look at IBM’s A series towers. The company’s hallmark black is now accentuated with intriguing angles and cut-aways in its front bezel such that the main plane of the fascia now looks more artistic than bland. Dell and HP have standardized on black, silver, and gray tones that are leaps beyond yesteryear’s beige. You can find a very similar look and feel in towers such as CasEdge’s 3GTH-002 and 3GTA-209. For a tower that conveys extremely slick, tasteful style covering a very well-constructed interior, check out Cooler Master’s (www.coolermaster.com) all-aluminum Wave Master.

It doesn’t take much to spice up plain looking units such as these. Many vendors offer optional side panels with windows, and the upgrade market for accessories ranging from illuminated case fans to cold cathode tubes to UV-sensitive round cables is expanding daily. A year ago, the common view was that such devices fell under the domain of do-it-yourself modders, thus leaving system builders out of the picture. Now that the mainstream has seen what the enthusiasts have been doing in their garages, they increasingly want a similar design but with out-of-the-box simplicity. There is plenty of room for system builders here, and if you choose your vendors carefully, you’ll find that the labor involved to make a system look as if just emerged from a seasoned hobbyist’s garage can be quite minimal.