The cases I'm useing are the ones compgeeks had for $20AR w/420w PS, I bought 7 of them... Had one power supply die on me, but can't expect much from a $20 case/PS combo. They also had front USB ports, windowed sides, and a tri-led case fan. I figure I did pretty good, but I wouldn't be willing to post a pic of the cheap things. The metal is sharp as hell, and I cut myself at least three times installing boards. When you pick them up, you can feel the metal bend with the weight of the drives.
Well, I built 5 overclocked 1700+ (2400+ or better) machines this year with them and other cheap/freeAR items and stayed under $1000 including monitors.
The most expensive parts were the vid cards, there aren't many cheap good ones, after searching awhile I ended up buying 128mbDDR Geforce4 440se cards from compgeeks for $50 a piece. I ended up selling all the systems I built this year ($350 a piece), except 1 which I have at home. So I made approx $400 from them. I did tell the people that the systems were overclocked and explained what that meant.
The one case I have that's good quality has a broken drive bay door. I got clumsy while installing a drive.
Tried to fix it, but I ended up loosing the spring that closed it. Also, it has a temp guage that the backlight stopped working on, and the superbright blue LED's on the front are to bright! I spent $130 on that case, I won't spend that much on a case ever again unless I build the case myself..
One good thing about cheap cases, those cases I bought have removeable motherboard trays, and the back panels are seperate pieces of metal held on with rivits. With a little work, they can be removed and used to help build custom cases out of plexiglass or other material.
Maybe I'll build something, maybe not.
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