My current non-cylinder case is perfectly adaptable to draw air from the bottom and push it out of the top or, if I wanted to be silly, the other way around. The shape of the case is irrelevant. The same applies to cable gaps and the like -- it's a solved problem in PC case design.

I am guessing here but I think the reason nobody uses a cylindrical design is that it uses a greater volume for the same components. A Macbook Air rendered into a cylinder would be about at least 2/3 of a Macbook Air's depth in diameter and about a Macbook Air's width (keyboard right-to-left) in height -- I think that's about the size of a Macbook Air?

At one time on some of my sites, I supported power inverters produced by a company in southern California. These were 10-50KW inverters and produced a fair amount of heat under load.

The cabinets all had grilles in the top for something like six fans, but only ever had two fans installed, both of which pulled air in from the top. The effect, easily demonstrated with a piece of string, was that air was pulled in to meet the rising warm air causing it to exit the closest empty fan slot and recirculate back into the inflowing fan... path of least resistance, and useless.

This was a feature, not a bug. Their marketing literature called it "positive pressuirzed cooling", obviously superior to having silly outflow fans in the top of the box like everyone else!

Needless to say overheating was a common problem for these systems, easily fixed by installing outflow fans (the originals could not be physically inverted due to the motor protruding beyond the plane of the outflow side).

I later met a former engineer from the company and asked about this curious design feature... He told me that the fans had been made to order, in large quantity at great cost savings, but they specified the wrong flow direction in the order. The mistake was not discovered until the first shipload arrived for the first production run... rather than eat their own dog food, their marketing people turned it into a "feature" and added it to the product literature.

Moral of story: There is market-speak, and there is truth. The two are rarely the same.

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what a great review . thanks

Thank you for the above also.

Intel invented the x86 and the x86-64 cpu architectures. It then invented PCIe and USB. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel#...1990s_programs

Recently it's created NUC - a small form factor PC but without an expandable graphics card. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Unit_of_Computing
Apparently, this was because Apple came up with the Mac Mini (which came out in 2005!).

AMD are working on a similar small form factor PC called 'project quantum'. But this will be a proper gaming PC. The project is not yet complete, so we can't buy it yet. http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd...cpu,29430.html

Apple's Mac Pro cylinder design came out in 2013. A long time ago (in computer years).
So the problem dune case has is that it's not competing with Apple. It's competing with new small form factors from Intel NUC (non-gaming) and AMD quantum project (gaming).
But the good thing about the dune case is you can choose more of your own hardware from a mini-itx form factor.

I hate to be pedantic but the x86-64 was invented by AMD and cross-licensed to Intel.

Good point. Thank you.

Even so, the ATX form factor may be a thing of the past, and smaller PCs may be part of the future.
It seems we all need smaller components and less electricity for everyday computer use. For gaming, we probably just need the same same tiny case with an extra bay for the graphics card.

A case is the same as a car. If you look at it as you walk away then you know you made the right choice

Personally I really like the design of the dune case, its something completely different and it seems the designers put a lot of effort into it.

I think it looks OK and reminiscent of an Apple design. Neither of which are bad things. I did object to the way it was marketed though as it seemed full of half-truths.
I'm happy with my monolith of a Fractal R4. I realise others won't like the look of it but the Dune case isn't a replacement it's an alternative for certain use cases. Show me a nice, thin case with heatpipes for the necessary places so that hotspots won't develop then I'll get excited. I fail to see the innovation here though.
A colleague mentioned. Something about a Samsung Galaxy with liquid cooling... I don't like slabs of glass but a tweaked cooling method is interesting.

Sorry, really, I don't dislike this case the gushing descriptions just annoyed me. As can probably be ascertained by my choice of case I'm a function over form guy every time.

This Intel NUC doesn't look too bad:http://www.amazon.com/Intel-NUC6i5SY...ords=NUC6i5SYH

It's a motherboard, Skylake cpu, psu and case. No gpu required as you can use the Intel Iris integrated gpu. Great for medium power use.
But for a gaming machine or high power use, you'll need a mini-itx form factor like the dune case.

Why Mini ITX? What benefits does it have? Especially, as I mentioned, in the case of the Dune where it takes up more room than a standard Mini ITX. Not that I understand the problem with a computer taking up room unless you have specific space requirements.
The same CPU, GPU hard drives an peripherals will use the same power regardless of whether you plug them into an ATX motherboard laying on a cardboard box or put them on a Mini ITX motherboard and put them in a case like the Dune.

This is purely a question of "taste" and nothing more. Again, the reason I took objection to the silly write-up of the Dune case in the first place was that it was claiming benefits which were plainly market-speak rubbish.

I made this joke about one of the Mac cases, and I think it applies now.

Someone demanded a "radical" design, one letter got missed, and it got communicated as a "radial" design, right?

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Currently, if you want a desktop PC you'll need to get an ATX-size setup. An ATX case will have many hard disk bays, many optical drive bays and a lot of unused space. An ATX motherboard will have many memory slots, many SATA ports, many USB ports. For most people this expandability is never used. It's a lot of wasted components and wasted space.
If you remove the waste on the case and motherboard, the global waste reduction will be significant.

A mini-ITX is designed to use low wattage processors, fewer and lower wattage memory cards. This is appropriate for low-power and medium-power users which is the category most people fall into.
Again the waste is reduced because more intelligent components means people do the same work on their PCs using less electricity.

The new smartphone industry has shown that you can have high power processors running on low power batteries. So now, the X86 desktop processors are slowly evolving to do the same thing and use less electricity.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini-ITX

The Mac Mini came out in 2005. It's a mini-ITX. The Mac Pro in 2013 became a small form factor. Intel's 2013 NUC is a mini PC as small as a mini-ITX. So this seems to show that the desktop PC is evolving into a set top box rather than a large inefficient ATX box.
Of course, the natural conclusion to make from this is that desktop PCs will become as small and power efficient as a smartphone.

The key here is that you are suggesting that "desktop PCs will become..." (emphasis mine) which does not mean that they are there yet and does not make a Mini ITX any more power efficient for the same components as a full-size case. You can argue materials costs to the environment, yes, but that's not what was being talked about here. Plus, it's difficult to say absolutely that the environmental costs of this are less than a standard size case just due to materials -- I suspect that it will use less power and the like but that's just a guess and for all we know the aluminium being used is more processed than one in a big case, for example.
Again, my objection is that this case is marketed as being significantly smaller than something it is obviously significantly smaller than and rather than doing anything new appears to be based upon an old Apple design. Any power savings one may achieve are nothing to do with the case itself but will come from careful component selection. In fact, to go back to the environmental costs, the customer would likely be better off buying a wooden or cardboard case (yes, they exist) as this thing .
By similar logic I would say a Raspberry Pi in cardboard box is more environmentally friendly, will do the job of a PC for most people and is significantly smaller than a desktop. That's all obvious though.

If they just said "look, guys, this case is relatively small, looks cute and will fit a decent-sized graphics card" I wouldn't be typing here. But, no, they're suggesting they have something new, innovative and in some way "better" and more efficient as well.

While I agree that it is possible that desktop PCs of current capability may become as small and power efficient as smartphones of current capability, I do not think that it follows that desktop PCs and smartphones of the same generation of silicon will, or should converge to the same size and power levels (as opposed to same power efficiencies).

I think that what will, and should happen is that boxes of suitable size and power usage for desktop environments will be packed with ever increasing capability, limited by the desktop form factors as they always have been.

Similarly, smartphones will continue to be packed with ever increasing capability, limited by the phone form factors.

But desktop PCs do not have their current size because that is how big they have to be - they are their current size because that was the appropriate physical size for the use case arrived at when the silicon was much less capable. As the silicon has improved, the box did not shrink in same proportion, rather the capability put into the box increased dramatically. The box stayed relatively the same size and power levels.

When the silicon began to be really good, smartphone devices became possible and flooded the market. But while they allowed an important new use case, they did not, and cannot really, replace the desktop use case.

Many, even very many, former PC users may now use smartphones exclusively. But that does not mean the phone replaced the desktop. Rather it means that they used the desktop because that was the only way to compute for a vrey long time. Now there is a new device, the smartphone which better fits their desired use case, so they use it instead.

But there are also very many desktop PC users who use them because it provides the compute power suitable for their use case. When they get the next generation of their desktop PC they expect correspondingly more compute power in a similar box, not necessarily a smaller box.

We read often that PCs and phones are converging - but I think that is more market-speak than reality driven. Suppliers sell more, similar units that way. While it is true that the silicon is converging, I see no reason why the devices should converge in size or capability.

I think it is more likely that the desktop and smartphone use cases are diverging along their separate paths, as they should be.

Ten years from now I do not want to be sitting at my desk tapping away at a small screen device, regardless of how much processing power it has. Rather I expect to have a box of similar footprint and power consumption to my current PCs sitting on my desk, but with almost unimaginably more processing and storage capability.

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