I am currently using this case:
http://www.xigmatek.com/product.php?productid=28
It is adequate and I have no real complaints but I'd like something larger if possible for better airflow. However the bigger cases seem an order of magnitude more expensive and not necessarily easier to route cables, for example. Are there any decent large cases out there that don't cost more tha n motherboard? Toolless is preferred but not essential.

Without telling us your price-range it is impossible to answer this question. Prices of motherboards go from about 30$ to a few hundred dollars, so "don't cost more than a motherboard" isn't telling us much.

Sorry, I have a ga-990xa-ud3 so it's about £75 now but I paid around £120 (~€160). I'd say under £200 but it depends upon features.

You look to have a Xigmatec Asgard 2 at 185x408x475mm, which I'd have said was fairly chunky, but if that isn't doing it for you, and the modest upgrade to the (cheaper) Xigmatek Asgard 381 black at 192x445x505mm (over half a meter of case!) doesn't float your boat, then consider:
can't really comment directly on quality of these cases, but Zalman, Cooler master and SilverStone are well known names and I'm not expecting rubbish from them. None of those are wildly expensive cases.

(at this point, I got bored, but have to point out that, in the interests of pushing your budget to the extremes, that you could go for a Supermicro 743I-465B black, which is a mere 452x178x648. You have to accept the 'you stole it from a server room' looks, but you can't have everything. Oh, but it does include a 500W psu, which may or may not be of use to you.)

And, in passing, I'll note that usually, when I've found that there have been cooling problems, a bigger box hasn't been the answer. More intelligent airflow often has, but then you might actually need to know what the airflow is doing and what the resultant temperatures are.

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Thanks, I'd not seen the 381 and the others seem interesting.
The 743I-465B is intriguing indeed. I do already have an adequate 750W PSU but I don't mind having a spare.
I know that airflow is important but I keep putting off the 8 hour job of trying to get my cables to route around this case when I ought to just be able to put the cables somewhere else. I'll not even start my rant about the combination of silly SATA port sockets on my motherboard and hard drives with the long side pointing in the same direction as the case (I forget the terms). Not to mentions that none of the fans I bought have a cable that's long enough to actually be able to mount them, but that's another question.

Offhand, the best fit I can think of for you might be the Fractal Design Define XL R2.

http://www.fractal-design.com/home/p...r2-black-pearl

Should be gettable for 100 quid or so-

http://www.staticice.co.uk/cgi-bin/s...e+XL+R2&spos=3

But I should warn you, bigger case does not automatically mean better airflow.....

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Thanks, that does look well thought out.
I realised that just having a bigger case won't help airflow but I really hope that cable routing in a PC is not always as horrendously complicated as my current setup makes it. It really does seem like mothorboard, PSU and case manufacturers got together and worked out how best to make it difficult to just route some cables.

I'll also point out that you can find cases that take up to a dozen fans, presumably in addition to the usual one or two on the processor, one or two on the graphics card, and maybe one on the chipset...I know that this is stretching a point to its breaking point, but you could, if tried really hard end up with eighteen or nineteen fans in the box. Now, I find this a little ridiculous, but I'm just trying to point out that there is the potential to mount so many fans that you can make passing helicopters seem as if they have suddenly found a stealth mode...

For an example of this kind of thing, see the Cooler Master CM 690 III (CMS-693-KKN1); I think this is rather expensive, but it isn't crazy expensive for a quality case, and it is 230x507x502, and takes
• 1x 200mm or 2x 140mm (optional)
• Fan(s) (rear): 1x 120mm
• Fan(s) (side): 1x 200mm (optional) or 2x 120mm (optional)
• Fan(s) (top): 1x 200mm (optional) or 2x 140mm (optional)
• Fan(s) (bottom): 1x 120mm (optional)
• Fan (HDD): 1x 120mm (optional)
(optional presumably meaning 'you can fit them, but we don't supply them' unless you pay extra). Review here.

Around a similar price AeroCool XPredator X3 Evil Black Edition with side panel window at 223x527x533 (Evil!!! and a bit orange) and AeroCool Mechatron black with side panel window (EN57028) 226x502x534 aren't as over the top on the fan count front, and are, in appearance, more of gamers cases than the sober Cooler Master, but, on the other hand, these Aero Cools don't save you much, if anything, over the Cooler Master. (If the choice was down to those three, I'd take the Cooler Master, because it is a pretty plain and neat black case, and there are are certainly people who would prefer that Evil AeroCool for exactly the same reason). There is also a BitFenix Raider (BFC-RDR-300-KKN1-RP) around a £60-70 mark, and I'm sure I've seen decent reviews for Bitfenix, in general.

So, perhaps where we should have started from, what have you got in there, and how much heat does it seem to be knocking out and what are the resulting temperatures?

Part of the reason I'm thinking of a new case is I've three fairly noisy case fans in this one and I'm hoping to either stay the same with a little more cooling in case I buy a faster graphics card or similar, ditch a fan or have them running slower. So I'd like plenty of room and places to put cables.
Currently I have:
An AMD FX-8120 with an Arctic Cooling Freezer 13 in place of the inadequate stock cooler.
On a Gigabyte GA-990Xa-UD3 motherboard.
An NVIDIA GT 640
4 3.5" hard drives
1 2.5" hard drive (sitting in a bay not screwed down)
1 OCZ SSD (loose next to the drive bays)
The PSU's a Corsair CX750

My temperatures for the hard drives are comfortably between 30C and 40C but, then, they would be with a fan blowing air past them.
The graphics card usually sits around at about 35C when I've just got YouTube or similar going and barely hits 50C when I'm using it.
The CPU is the only thing that gets hot at all but now, thanks to the after-market cooler, the hottest sensor reading (out of two which I understand are different types of sensor) is about 52C when using YouTube etc. while the cooler of the two is between 40C and 45C. If I run mprime I can get the lower reading to hit around 55C but it stays there with only the hotter temperature budging 70C occasionally.

As I said, the motivation is to drop a fan or have the ones I have being able to run a little slower.
More drive bays and a layout that would allow me to swap hard drives easier and route SATA cables out of the way without needing twenty pairs of infant-sized hands would also be good.
The ability to fit a long, hot graphics card would be good too in case I want to upgrade.
my current case isn't that bad but to get any decent airflow I'd need the afore-mentioned infant-sized hands to route the cables. I'm sure somebody could route things in the case beautifully but I need something I can get the blunt instruments I call hands into and the room to clip things out of the way.
I have considered one of the open bench-testing type setups or the skeletal cases but I'm not sure the former would be good for a permanent setup and the latter seem to be lacking in drive bays.
I did see a great looking case that was basically two standard cases mated together but sadly it was around £300 which is way over what I could justify spending even if I had the money spare.

Thanks for the clarification - it wasn't clear whether you were a mad gamer who wouldn't be happy until the on/off switch had been overclocked within an inch of its life or, err, a more mainstream user.

AMDs stock coolers do tend to sound a bit raw, so irrespective of cooling performance that's probably a good move.

With the 'loose next to the drive bays' comment, maybe the thing that would be driving me would be more 'get more drive bays' (if that's the problem), I don't know.

Really, the temps sound fine. So, I'd say the motivation is probably 'quieter' rather than 'cooler', probably with a side order of 'and neater would be better'. I think the first thing that I'd do is to try to find out which of the fans makes the most of the noise that you experience and think whether that can be just slowed down a little, without unduly influencing temperatures, or whether, maybe, it can just be replaced with a higher-quality and quieter one. Fitting cables is always a bit of a fiddle, but you don't really do it often.

But, if you are set on a new case, then you are set on a new case. And, in that context, giving you advice on 'tuning' your existing case is a bit of a waste of time, but you really aren't far off with what you've got, so it does seem a shame.

Well, 'tuning' my existing set-up won't be a waste of time since I don't intend to run out and buy a new case tomorrow but it is the next upgrade I have planned. You have also reminded me that I haven't removed a fan after upgrading my CPU cooling -- which I may be able to do now. I could also revisit my fan positioning though not properly until I buy some fan extension cables as the cables on the fans I do have seem excessively short.
I do, technically, have enough drive bays -- I don't have the relevant adaptors at present though and one of the reasons is that I'm not sure how I'd route the cables if I did. I would also lose drive bays if I had a full-length graphics card as, though it doesn't necessarily look like it from the pictures, the back of the drives stick out a few cm in front of the motherboard. This causes the problem I related about routing cables.
I don't regret buying the case as it fit in with my budget at the time and now I've a decent CPU cooler I can see it's an adequate design. However I think when I can afford to spend a little I should buy a better quality case as it is something I could keep and use for future upgrades in 5 to 10 years time even.
I have to admit I was a little deliberate in not laying out my precise requirements and reasons initially as wanted to gain a broad picture of the options people would come up with. Whether I buy a new case tomorrow or spend more time and a little more money on this one does depend upon whether I see enough value in an option and whether there actually is a case out there that would make life easier for me.
I have read reviews and specifications but it seems that, for example, to find out whether a full length graphics card and 6 hard drives will fit I have to resort to Google Images and with the thousands of cases out there I have spent hours doing that without really finding out much.

Here is a piece of information that I suspect does not help, but...

Phoronix has a review of the Silverstone Fortress FT04 case; now while the author clearly likes this case (and Silverstone cases in general), he reviews it at $210 (...and I can see it on the UK market for about £180, which is bad, but it could be worse, unfortunately).

(In general, I'm not quite sure I can see any particular point of a Linux (and/or BSD) specific case review, but it is what it is, and I happened to see it and thought back to this thread.)

Now, I haven't done a detailed comparison but the FT03 is available for just over £100, which is a bit more reasonable (ok, ok, I still think that's expensive, but I'm not sure that you will find it objectionably expensive). What I do notice is that the FT03 misses out on those extra big fans that give the Ft04 its massive airflow without massive noise and which in the FT04 are a star of the show, but it will still be a quality bit of kit even without those.

Not my definition of an affordable case, but your mileage will vary.

Not exactly bigger than mine but a friend recently bought one of these and from what I hear (or don't ) I'm impressed:
http://www.corsair.com/us/carbide-se...ower-case.html
Not seen it yet but he tells me he had an easy build and it does seem a little better thought out than mine, is much quieter and has top venting which could be good.

If you look here, you will find links to half a dozen or so reviews, and prices from a variety of sources. And the price isn't all that unreasonable, even by my standards. Mind you, I had thought that you wanted a big case

The Carbide you linked to has only four drive bays, but you have six drives. Why would you want to buy a case that can't hold all your hardware?