14 DAY TRIAL // For some reason or other, mini personal computers have become more popular over the past couple of years, which means that small form factor cases have more potential buyers now. Japanese company Abee is looking to take advantage of this.
Desktop cases can usually hold all types of mainboards up to a certain size. Mini-ITX is the smallest (not counting nano-ITX and other mobile/laptop items), while E-ATX and XL-ATX are the largest.
Abee is focusing exclusively on the smallest size, mini-ITX. It has launched the Acubic C10R line of enclosures which, as the name implies, have the shape of a cube.
Not a perfect cube though. The exact measurements (LxWxH) are of 239 x 229 x 229 mm / 9.40 x 9.01 x 9.01 inches.
That means enough room for the mainboard itself, as well as all the necessary add-ons like memory, a hard drive, a video board, the CPU cooler, etc.
For those who want specifics, there is one 5.25-inch optical disk drive bay (DVD, Blu-ray, etc.), one 3.5-inch internal bay (for hard disk drives) and one 2.5-inch bay (for smaller HDDs or solid-state drives).
Add-on cards can be up to 190 mm long (7.48 inches), which should include NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 660 Ti, or some versions of it anyway.
All in all, Abee's Acubic C10R can be an excellent HTPC case (home-theater personal computer), but it could also hold a reasonably powerful PC, strong enough for all games to run comfortably, provided the CPU installed is good enough. The same goes for the memory.
As for cooling, Abee installed a 120 mm fan at the front, for air intake, and made space and fixtures for two 60 mm exhaust fans at the back.
Everything is packed inside a metallic body colored black (piano), white (glossy), silver, blue or red. That's really the only difference between the five, the color. Even the aluminum panels and opaque acrylic front panels are otherwise the same.
Abee's Acubic C10R 3.2 kilogram case (7 pounds) is priced at 27,980 Yen, or $320 / 246 Euro.
