Category: Gaming

10 of the best micro-ATX and mini-ITX cases for your next PC build

Picking the right case can make or break a PC build. It’s the exoskeleton of your rig, and everything has to fit perfectly within it. This becomes even more important when you’re planning on getting a smaller motherboard, as you’ll have even less space to work with. There are a lot of case options out there, and picking the right one for you is a personal decision. Many cases can fill the same role, but they’ll look different doing it.

We already took a look at 25 of the best computer cases to start with for your next system build, but now we’re going to take a more specialized look at 10 of the best cases for a micro-ATX or mini-ITX motherboard.

These aren’t just cases that look pretty. Some are our personal favorites, cases we’ve built our own rigs with. Others come highly recommended by do-it-yourselfers and professional reviewers. We’ve gone digging through buyer feedback and reviews to find cases that are as cleverly designed and reliable as they are attractive.

A note on affiliates: some of our stories, like this one, include affiliate links to stores like Amazon. These online stores share a small amount of revenue with us if you buy something through one of these links, which helps support our work evaluating PC components

The (leaked) Just Cause 3 system requirements are here

Just Cause 3 is a game about blowing stuff up, just ’cause it’s there. Get it? It’s a play on words! Is the cause just, or is it all just ’cause? It’s quite clever, actually, because it so succinctly captures the dichotomy of videogames, in which you, as the savior figure, inflict levels of violence that transcend gratuitous and push into the obscene, all in the ostensible pursuit of a higher, perhaps noble, sometimes beautiful, goal. It’s a disconnect between means and end that’s so ubiquitous in our genre that some developers choose to not simply overlook it, but embrace it, essentially encouraging players to ignore the studio’s envisioned narrative in favor of indulging their worst anti-social tendencies, guilt and consequence-free.

So anyway, here’s what you’ll need to play it.

Minimum Specifications

  • OS: Vista SP2, Win 7 SP1, Win 8.1 (64-bit Operating System Required)
  • CPU: Intel Core i5-2500K, 3.3 Ghz | AMD Phenom II X6 1075T 3 Ghz
  • Memory: 6GB RAM
  • Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 (2GB) | AMD Radeon HD 7870 (2GB)

Recommended Specifications

  • OS: Vista SP2, Win 7 SP1, Win 8.1 (64-bit Operating System Required)
  • CPU: Intel Core i7-3770, 3.4 GHz | AMD FX-8350, 4.0 GHz
  • Memory: 8 GB Ram
  • Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 (3GB) | AMD R9 290 (4GB)

To get a feel for exactly what Just Cause 3 can bring to the table if you have the hardware to support it, feast your eyes on the 4K trailer that developer Avalanche released earlier this month, and don’t miss our hands-on from October. Just Cause 3 comes out on December 1.

Anchors in the Drift fails to reach its Fig goal by nearly $400,000

If you want to shave a few bucks off your electric bill and save a couple trees, the most common methods involve buying all new appliances and just turning everything off all the time. But you can actually trim your bills and reduce your carbon footprint with a simple piece of software called Granola. This little applet sits in the system tray of your Linux or Windows PC, monitors how much energy your processor is using and scales back on the Mhz when not needed.

There really isn’t much to Granola; you download it, install it and run it. If you really deem it necessary, you change the default power settings (although we’ve found the standard settings strike the perfect balance between energy savings and performance). Choose between three different energy-saving profiles, essentially translating to low, middle and high power. The preferences menu has just a few other options, letting you customize how Granola reports your power savings. You can choose your currency (only American dollars, British pounds and Euros for now), set the cost per kWh in your area, choose between pounds and kilograms for CO2 measurements, and choose between cumulative or annual reporting.