When Fractal Design introduced its Define S chassis a little over three years ago, PCs—and indeed, PC cases—looked a lot different than they do now. Power-supply shrouds were rare, and builders didn't take any issue with a neat bundle of slack cabling zip-tied up in front of their PSUs. Since that time, most every case designer has embraced the shroud at every price point. A visible power supply and cabling these days is kind of like jorts: functional, but unfashionable.

The space demands on the average case have changed, too. With the ever-greater density of hard drives and the increasing accessibility of NAS boxes, builders don't need 10 local 3.5" devices to reach 10 TB of storage in a system. They can just slap one big drive in there or plug in a Gigabit Ethernet cable to reach their disk array. SSDs don't take up as much space as they used to, either. Builders rarely need to choose 2.5" storage when even SATA SSDs can go right on the motherboard, and the majority of NVMe drives need an M.2 slot to work at all.