Here is the casing unit of my Skylake Hackintosh Build.

Meet the Quad Mini Cube

At the initial stages of planning and researching for the build, I had these requirements concerning its casing and form factor:

• it has to be smaller than a full ATX rig, either mATX or an ITX build
• able to accommodate a discrete GPU (preferably full-sized), for future upgrading
• since I prefer it to be air-cooled, it has to have adequate ventilation and can house an after-market heatsink
• and it’ll be great to have at least one window

With all these written in stone, the only clear option for me at the time was getting a Corsair Carbide 240 – Until I saw the Tecware Quad Mini Cube; its unique design of having a horizontal motherboard layout paired with three viewing windows (top and both sides) really reminded me of the open hoods/engine bays of those awesome 30s Ford hot rods. What’s more, it only goes for a third of the 240’s price! So I decided to have a 30s hot rod for the theme and got the Tecware Quad at a discounted price of S$69.00 from VII PC Trade at Sim Lim.

Gallery

Review

I think the Tecware Quad Mini Cube is pretty decent for its price point. Usually you’d expect less from sub-$100 cases. This has a solid build, the rig itself is really rigid and doesn’t have much flex. It’s darn heavy, which I think is good – specially having two toddlers at home who love to tinker and play around with stuff. I love how it was considerately built to be generally tool-free; it uses thumbscrews not only for the side panels but also for the PSU and SSD backplates. I also like that it has tool-free HDD caddies where you could easily snap in the 3.5″ HDDs and just slot them in, snapping the caddies firmly into place. It also has removable dust filters behind the front panel and under the PSU bay, which is really great. And I really like that the cables are all black – none of those mustard and ketchup wires. For those planning to use liquid cooling units, the chassis already comes with a removable 240mm bracket which can also be used to accommodate two 120mm fans. Oh, and this already comes with two case fans: a 200mm white led intake at the front (which can be swapped with two 120mm fans) and a 120mm exhaust at the back.

What I didn’t like…

What I thought that could’ve been further improved though is the design of the stands: it mimics the ventilation design of the top panel, purely for aesthetic purposes I presume, but its inner part is enclosed. When dust starts to accumulate inside it, there’s apparently no easy way to clean that up. So for me that’s a minus point on the product design, not a biggie but still would’ve been nice if it was hollow/open from the inner side and could be easily cleaned up.

Do you guys think I could’ve chosen a better chassis for this build? If you were building a MicroATX rig, which case would you have gotten? Let me know in the comments section.

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Lance Sison, Rockstar for Hire.

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