You’d think that there’s not much you could do wrong when picking out a case for your PC. Sadly, experience has shown us that this is by no means true. Many PC cases seem very precious and appear to offer a good build quality at first glance. Taking a closer look often reveals that their good looks can be very deceiving.

Tom’s Hardware has checked out four current mini-PC cases, all of which were sent to us as “brand new” designs by their respective manufacturers. The models reviewed here all cost about €70, which is a lot of money for a case of this size. After all, these enclosures don’t contain any hardware whatsoever. You’ll need to buy a motherboard, PSU and all other components separately. By the time you’re done, that can add up to a couple of hundred quid.

At first blush, it would seem you get a small and very stylish PC case that would be the gem of every LAN party. However, we found a good number of details on each of our candidates that would go unnoticed in a store and especially when ordering from an online store. These flaws would only become apparent at home, when it is already too late.

Even disregarding the plastic flaps that we have been criticizing for years, some of the test candidates seem more suited to becoming scrap metal at your neighbourhood junk yard than best sellers. In some cases, no pun intended, the enclosures rattles even as we unpacked them, with no additional hardware installed! Drive cages seem to bend just by looking at them – not exactly inspiring confidence on our part. As you can imagine, we had a field day with some of these flaws and documented our personal favourites in the videos at the end of the review. We hope you enjoy them as much as we did.