Thermaltake is about to unveil its new case, named the LAN Box. Details of this chassis is not yet up on its main website but can be seen hereand it looks awesome. Basically it looks like any Shuttle barebone case, but has a neat handle on the top for convenient carrying and is probably slightly larger. This eliminates the need for a bag to carry your PC around. It also has decent ventilation, as you can see it incorporates 2 60mm exhaust fans and allows for an additional 92mm fan to be placed on the side. For further cooling, an additional 60mm fan can be added onto the chassis if needed. The ducts on top and the front help in airflow too.
Design wise, it can house a Mini ATX motherboard and full sized PCI cards. My guess is that it could probably hold 3-4 cards inclusive of the graphics card. There are 3 external front bays, 2 that can house 2 CD drives and one 3.5” bay for a legacy floppy or an internal card reader. Whats interesting is that the larger external bay can house a 7” accessory, and as in the picture, Thermaltake has included a 7” LCD touch screen. Now I’ve always thought that it would be neat to have one of these and if your miniPC has an acrylic side panel, you could actually hook up one of these quite easily. The only problem is how to run the cables from the LCD to the graphics card. Thermaltake’s LAN Box probably would have mechanisms to do this and I hope they are fairly simple and don’t require you use that bulky VGA DVI connector on the outside of the case. This design would need you to then place the case right in front of you if you don’t plan on using a monitor.
