Testing Procedure

The overall score is made up of the following rating criteria:

Construction of case, exterior, side panels and front door Edges and corners, risk of injury when opening the case and installing hardware Installation of the motherboard, expansion cards and various power supplies Wiring for front ports, drives, motherboards Expandability and installation of hard drives and 5.25" drives and fan-speed controller

Our Testing Hardware

To make our scores as realistic as possible, we installed various hardware components in each midi tower. The foundation for the PC was an IC7-MAX3 motherboard from Abit. We then mounted an AGP graphics board from MSI and - case permitting - a 4-channel controller from Advansys. While it isn't the most bleeding-edge board, we were more interested in trying to install a PCI long card. The hard drives were chosen from a number of 40 GB models from various manufacturers. Our 5.25" drive was a 16x DVD drive from MSI. We used an ultra-short Superflower Fan Master for our fan-speed controller because we knew that it couldn't be installed on every midi case.

IC7MAX3 from Abit is the foundation for the PC.

Not exactly MSI's flagship model anymore: we were more interested in installing the AGP card.

The 4-channel controller was developed in the 90s as a PCI long card.

We wanted to mount four hard drives in every case.

The Superflower fan-speed controller showed whether the cases could accommodate short 5.25" devices.

The new Targan PSU TG380-U01 has a rat's nest of long cabling.

The Levicom PSU is ½" deeper, and a good example of oversized power supplies for our midi tower round-up.

The new golden Enermax power supply uses a short 40 cm cable that is also very rigid.

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