Test Procedure

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

Workmanship of the case, side panels, front panel and connectors Edges and corners: accident risk on opening and during installation of hardware Installation of mainboard and long and short expansion cards as well as various power supplies Cabling of the front connectors, drives, motherboards Installation and addition of hard drives and 5.25" drives

We Used This Hardware For The Test

We installed various hardware components in each midi tower to make the test as realistic as possible. The PC motherboard we chose was the IC7-MAX3 from Abit.

We mounted an AGP graphics card from MSI to the board, and - if the case allowed - a 2-channel ISDN adapter from Multi-Multi-Tech. While it's not the newest model anymore, we were primarily interested in seeing whether it was possible to install a long PCI card.

We used several different makes of hard drives for the test. For a 5.25" drive we chose a 16x DVD drive from MSI.

For the power supply, this time around we went with products from Tagan and FSP. Both supplies had to be easily installed separately if the case did not include a preinstalled unit.

Motherboard IC-7MAX3 from Abit as a basic platform

Older graphics card from MSI: we were mainly interested in the installation.

Long PCI cards like this 2-channel ISDN adapter are real museum pieces

A direct comparison reveals how long PCI cards used to be...

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