[PLUS] Buyer’s Guide: 8 Mini-ITX Cases Compared With Brand New Test Method

No more big towers, let’s get something compact? Time for a round-up test, in this article we take a closer look at eight current Mini-ITX cases. This time with a brand new system and case testing procedure.

Everything shines, beautifully new

With the new housing system, we are now testing with a much more power-hungry and modern configuration. On the graphics card side, an Asus TUF RTX 3080 12 GiB will serve as a permanent reference, which is also ideal for testing many modern ITX cases due to its dimensions. In addition, there is an Intel Core i7-12700K limited to 160 watts, which, in combination with a narrower 240 All-in-One Alphacool Eisbaer LT, should be universally applicable without overheating directly in ITX and Midi cases. With the limit, differences under heavy CPU load (in our case Cinebench R23) can be worked out more finely. Depending on the housing, the compact water cooler is placed in the best possible position without seriously changing the standard positions of the supplied housing fans. In order to keep the raw data between large and small cases comparable, at least in terms of performance, purely in terms of the components, the Asus ROG Strix B660-i Gaming with Corsair Vengeance DDR5-5600 RAM (height: 35 mm) serves as the mainboard. In terms of equipment and properties, a distinction will be made between ITX/M-ATX (ergo mini case) and ATX/E-ATX (midi and big tower) in the future, so that the final score can no longer be explicitly rated one-to-one. Due to the different areas of use with different requirements and advantages, ITX cases no longer have to meet the same criteria as big tower cases. The performance part of the mini housing consists of two equally weighted parts, namely temperature (cooling in degrees Celsius) and volume (loudness in sones at a distance of 50 cm).

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