[wlesieutre]

I had a mini ITX case (Node 202) and liked it well enough once it was all closed up, but even with a modular power supply it's a bit of a mess to get all the cables to fit, and it was a nuisance to open back up. The case went together with plastic clips that would rather snap off instead of releasing.

But last time I upgraded my computer I switched to micro ATX and I'm happier with that size. Any maintenance or upgrades are a breeze with room to get your fingers around the components, I didn't need to buy a special low profile CPU cooler, it's small enough, and if I need an extra PCIe slot for something I've got it.

The new computer is mounted it to under my desk where it's out of the way. Unless you're carrying your desktop around to LAN parties I think this is an overall nicer solution to "desktops take up space" than tiny form factor cases.

[alanfranz]

I think uatx is great but cases are simply too large. My uatx case has a lot of space for hard drives and dvdrw that simply sits unused.

A uatx case without such wasted space would be totally great. Atx power supply, decent mobo ports, good ventilation, et cetera.

[wlesieutre]

Mine's in an InWin 301. Not the smallest possible, but reasonably compact. No optical drive bay, one 3.5", three 2.5". Airflow is suboptimal, the front fans turn 90 degrees and blow out through small gaps in the side, so I've used fans there with high static pressure rather than high flow rate and it seems to work well enough.

But I'm not doing any overclocking and my GPU is solidly midrange, for a hotter computer you might want better ventilation.

https://www.in-win.com/en/gaming-chassis/301/

Only small nuisance is I can't open it up while it's in the desk mount, so I have to unplug all the cables and remove it. Don't do that often enough to complain about it, might be able to fix it by dremelign off a chunk of the mount if I were concerned.

Glass panel is not really by bag, but under the desk I don't care about it. Solid side option is available but I wouldn't pay extra for it.

[alanfranz]

Size-wise, it is very similar to mine, a cheap Itek Patriot Mini, which seems just a bit smaller than yours. 3.5" bays take space.

I don't care a lot about space either since it's under my desk. But I think it would be easy to create a smaller uatx case by dropping fans/3.5" bays/other things that a miniitx drops.

EDIT: Something like this could be good for me: https://www.itekevo.com/en/product/case-smallcom-g/

mm 171x308x360 , this is probably close to the smallest size that could be achieved with a uatx without blocking slots.

[rglullis]

Do people still have LAN parties?

[wolrah]

> Do people still have LAN parties?

I averaged one or two a year through the 2010s, but my last one was in early 2020 for obvious reasons.

While most games can be played over the internet these days and voice/video chat is now accessible enough that the experience can be pretty close, in the end there's still nothing like being in the same room as your friends when you're either cooperating to take down a raid boss or taunting them after a headshot.

[wlesieutre]

Exciting news for Halo: Infinite on this front, the Xbox folks can join you as long as they’re cool with playing against the mice and keyboards.

https://www.pcgamer.com/halo-infinite-will-let-you-use-your-...

And maybe more importantly, LAN multiplayer actually exists in case of ISP problems, server outage, or trying to play the game in 20 years when the official servers are long gone.

[wolrah]

AFAIK the same has worked in Halo: MCC for as long as that's been available on PC. I've certainly been cross-playing my replay of the campaigns, rotating between PC, Xbox One, and XSX based on whatever I'm in front of at the time.

It is nice that Microsoft finally acknowledged a few years ago that their consoles are Windows devices that have USB ports and stopped disabling keyboard/mouse support. The idea that console users were banned from better FPS input for years was just nonsensical.

Now if only we could get them to mandate keyboard/mouse support instead of making it optional. There's no good reason to force console players to not be able to aim properly.

[wlesieutre]

I know someone who's building a mini ITX computer with one of AMD's APUs for convenient LAN party travel, so it's a non-zero number! Been years since I went to one.

[jhloa2]

I had one a few weeks ago for the first time in probably a decade. It was so much fun that we're going to try to organize them more frequently.