Ultimate compact gaming case tested

THE MOBILE GAMING MARKET is currently a field of battle between manufacturers that produce gaming notebooks and those that produce small form factor cases that fit desktop components. Charlie recently published his take on the gaming notebook market, and I could not agree more.

Carrying around heavy notebooks like big ones from Dell's XPS series just does not cut it. In an ideal world, laptop manufacturers would not act like conservative cans and avoid implementation of PCIe External connector, thus generating possibility to upgrade the graphics subsystem with 8800/2900 graphics cards in their own case. However, sadly, since PCIe External 1.0a spec was not implemented by notebook makers, you are stuck with either carrying around 5-10 kilos on your back, or opt for a mobile gaming rig.

After being in the same hotel for seven weeks last year with nothing else but my Samsung Q30Plus-SSD (yes, subnotebook with integrated craphics), I decided to go out and find a case that would be easily transportable in planes (author of this article flew 114.000 miles this year, mostly in economy class). Yet, it had to have powerful hardware to play some games.

Bear in mind that my goal was to host only the best on the gaming market, so system had to endure not less than two gigs of memory, a quad-core processor, and a GeForce 8800 board. I did not want to hear about gaming with allegedly gaming cards such as 2600XT or 8600GTS. These boards were designed with only one thing in mind (conquer highest market share in notebook segment), so I was interested in something with at least 300W PSU.

We met with Sean from GTR Tech a while back at E3. This bright lad is usually pissing off rich people in amateur racing league, where his Mitsubishi Lancer Evo likes to smoke the beemers, dodges and other weekend-racers. When he is not pissing richboys off, he designs things like GT3 case. Sean explained to us that his goal was to create portable racer, a case that you can take just like your notebook, but this case will endure components that are thermally challenging all those smaller cases on the market.

Thus, GT3 was born. This case is relatively expensive (asking price is 250 dollars), so we were interested can this product eat up all of our components. When it comes to beaching about the price, bear in mind that we plan to place over 2000 dollars of gear inside, so saving on a case is not a subject. If you are on a budget, you can fit Athlon 64 X2 or entry-level C2D processors on an NForce powered board, overclock it, and stay inside 1000-dollar range even with 8800GTS board inside.

Carbon-fibre looking saviour

It is actually far smaller case than it looks... and packs a punch

Carbon-fibre look is sadly, just the look - but in reality, using carbon fibre chassis would skyrocket the price upwards. Case is actually a combination between SECC steel, aluminium, and plastics.

Front side has big GT3 logo that glows in nice and pleasant blue colour, giving clear sign that is in charge of this one. Our big complaint comes from the optical drive perspective. GT3 case spots a place for a slim optical drive, and this case does not come with it. Sadly, they are a rare find, but this case just would not fit a classical, "fat" 5.25" drive.

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Can this small space host a number of high-end components? Hopefully, it will...

From outside, knowing that motherboard can go only one-way, it looks that this case cannot fit anything else but integrated graphics. Sleek design, it looks far smaller than on pictures and most importantly - it looks easily transportable.

Building a gaming monster
In the end, we opted for following components:

Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6800 at 2.93 GHz Zalman CNPS-7000 Cu (original one, made in 2003) EVGA 680i motherboard 4GB Mushkin PC-8500 LeadTek GeForce 8800GTS 320MB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 250GB 16MB cache BFG PhysX 128MB PCI card

We were hoping to assemble an AMD-based gaming rig, but the current situation with AMD PR folk is such that these lads are not returning e-mails lately. Therefore, Kentsfield it is. It is currently a better product anyways. I had some concerns can Kentie QX6800 fit in the power envelope when paired with an 8800 card, but Sean dispelled our concerns. He claims 375W inside this case can bear a bit Kentie and an overclocked 8800GTS card like EVGA's SuperClocked/ACS3 or BFG's OC and OC2 cards.

Add-in board choice is limited to a single PCIe x16 and single PCI card

Ageia PhysX card fought for single PCI space with Killer NIC and Creative X-Fi, but as we just got GRAW2, PhysX board got our nod. If you do not want to go nForce 680i and want a BeerLake-based motherboard, we would advise you to opt for a Killer NIC one, to get the best networking features and lower the CPU overhead.

Placing all components on the board and connecting everything is an imperative...

Once that you open the case, everything just sits in the right place. There are three intake fans, but two of them influence the case, while one fan just serves to cool down Fortron's 375W power supply. Upper intake fan (80x80x25mm, 2000 rpm) is located at the upper right corner and will bring a lot of air for hard drive, processor and upper part of the motherboard, while lower is a bit bigger (92x92x25mm, 2000 rpm). Lower fan is dedicated to bring as much air as possible for the aluminium cage that spots one PCIe x16 (dual-slot compatible) and one PCI slot. Graphics cards are not specified, but you can safely put 8800GTS graphics card and below. 8800GTX will be just a bit off, you're lacking around 4cm - for 2900XT, you would need a 8-pin to Molex or 6-pin to Molex adapter since this power supply gives out just one 6-pin PEG connector.

Putting an Extended ATX board like EVGA's 680i proved to be a bit of a challenge, but it was a non-issue in the end, board sit comfortably in its place. A rather big part of the motherboard is invisible once that everything is locked in, so what you need to do is to make sure you do not need to do any aftermath work. Before the board goes in, put the system memory in, processor, cooler - and when you put the motherboard in, connect everything - external USB connectors, sound, power on/off/reset/LED switches, since you have to put the add-on boards in a special cage.

...if you didn't do that, trying to do something in assembled case like this will be a cause for a headache

Once that you have all the boards you want in this GT3 cage, you have to connect the PCB with x16 connector and a long cable for the PCI slot. Once this trickiest part is done, you have to secure everything with screws and then you are free to close the case down. After that, you're done.

In our testing, it showed up that Fortron 350W was sufficient for multi-hour gaming sessions in 1920x1200 resolution (FullHD). Company of Heroes, Ghost Recon 2: Advanced Warfighter, Half-Life 2: Episode One, F.E.A.R., World of WarCraft - we have tried all of these games and suffered only two crashes - both were in a press edition of GRAW2, but we're not so sure it would happen with a retail copy (if we had one). Overall, this one passed with flying colours.

In short
Even though we had some reservations, this GT3 works quite beautifully. Seeing quad-core in action with the excellent Mushkin memory does not leave a lot to desire for, same thing applies for LeadTek's GeForce 8800GTS card. If you want one powerful, yet small and airplane-friendly gaming machine, this is the one to go.

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Listening to: artist - PANI THULI
via FoxyTunes