It's currently in an Antec P180 from the initial batch over 9.5 years ago, which meets the silence and cooling requirements, but is too large, and the front ports are broken (it was a problem with early editions of it). And, of course, when I built it, it actually needed most of those drive bays, as it was a Pentium D with a gig of RAM and a stack of drives, when now I really don't (I have 10 TB of RAID 5 with SSD cacheing accessible over iSCSI with four more empty drive bays). Two rebuilds in that case later, here's what I have to stuff into the new case, and the basic requirements and things I'd like:
Hardware I have:
- Intel DG965WH
- Intel Core 2 Quad
- NVidia GTX 560
- 8 GB RAM
- 128 GB SSD, 500 GB HDD (the HDD is on the to upgrade list)
- BD-ROM/DVD-RW, and DVD-RW drive (two drives)
- USB Card reader
- Full ATX size board and CPU, I love the flexibility of it and my media center has tended to get hand-me-down boards from a much bigger desktop
- 400W TDP worth of cooling between video and CPU, as with some gaming I only see that requirement going up
- Two HDDs and one SSD, minimum, for storage
- 5.25" Optical drive bay
- No exposed door edges to catch on things, as it's being installed at Labrador tail level (sadly, too much experience there)
- Easy to run with positive pressure and filtered air (see above Labrador)
- 17"-ish width and CE feel
- Front USB 3.0 ports
- Media reader or 3.5" external bay for media reader installation
- A VFD or similar display (mostly for WAF)
- Optical drive bay flap that matches case exterior
- Internal IR capable, so I don't require the external box
- Front panel audio ports
- Front panel 1394
- Second 5.25" bay for a second optical drive