Lee989

Thanks for the feedback, I'll check the PSU tier list, I think I just threw in that PSU based on a build recommendation for someone else on here. Thanks for the advice on the mp510 i'll check that out (I knew splitting storage would save a little money but I hadn't a clue which cheap SSD to use if I did that).
 
Currently thinking either an rx5600xt or rtx 1660 super for the GPU. Both seem to be solid 1080p GPU's. The 1660S looks to be £40+ cheaper and doesn't seem that far behind the 5600xt on performance so unless the BF deals change that I think i'll be buying my first Nvidia card in 15 years.
 
I did consider dropping down to the 2600x with 3200mhz but not sure if the ~£60 saving is worth it. I'd be removing most of the upgrade headroom if she ever wanted to upgrade to a 5700xt or possibly even better in future.
 
One thing is certain, spending someone else's money makes me strangely more anxious than spending my own!
 
 

As said, as long as you don't mix them in one header, it doesn't matter. Like my case fans are 3pin and CPU has PWM. All are controlled with SpeedFan (I have older mobo), so I can go to 30% with 3pins and 0rpm with CPU fans.
 
You can see options for header control from BIOS. I recommend getting familiar with BIOS overall.

Rather than answer each question you had individually, I'll try to go for the general approach. You can mix and match fans all day, the system won't care. The only problem with Non-PWM fans is they can't "spin-down" slower than PWM fans due to a minimum voltage required to even turn the motor.
 
So it's more of a question of finding that bare minimum point and seeing if keeping it there still generates too much noise for you.

Hi everyone! Since i've just started to look into building a budget rig a whole decade after I last built a PC I thought i'd share in my little nostalgia trip. Please note all these images were taken on a dirt cheap Fuji digital camera or worse a mobile phone (don't forget it was 2006). They are pretty bad quality, small and i've had to crop some of them heavily (I never took them with the intention of sharing online).
 
Just to set the scene, I was fresh out of school, working 12 hour factory shifts for £3/hr saving what I could to build myself my first PC. It took me months of saving up but I eventually had enough to place my parts order. I'd never spent so much money in one go and I still remember spending literally hours staring at the checkout cart convincing myself to press the buy button. Obviously I did it in the end, otherwise this would be a very boring post indeed.
 

There's some additional parts I bought from other vendors like a CPU cooler, cables and a fan controller, but only this vendor would show me my order history going so far back. I believe the total build cost was around the £600 mark.
 
Parts delivered, I was clearly too excited to take a bundle shot, but I did find a shot of the CPU and Mobo. I still have all the boxes for this build in my parents attic.

 
So what are we putting all this gear into you might be wondering? A Thermaltake Soprano? A Coolermaster Storm?! Possibly one of those aluminium Lian-Li cases that were super light weight?...
 
None of those! I had this

 
Of course I wasn't going to leave it like that. I didn't really know what I was going to turn it into, but I was young, had zero DIY skills, no workshop, and the key's to my dads toolbox. Who wouldn't decide to wing it on a custom case modding project!
 
My rough idea was to flatten the side panels, put in a window, add some lights and transfer a decal of space gas cloud I had an odd obsession with at the time. So let's get started!
 
Step 1 was to flatten the right side panel. This should have been the easiest job. Fill it, sand it and paint it. Because the impression was only a couple millimeters deep I decided to opt for a spray on filler.

 
That was an absolutely stupid idea. A couple of millimeters might not sound like a lot, but it took 1 and half tins of spray on filler and 2 days of spraying and drying cycles to build it up. Oh and to top it off, it never turned fully solid for sanding. It kept this rubbery texture. I assume the spray can fillers are meant for scratch filling...
 
Anyway, after trying to sand it down and the filler just clogging the sand paper or coming off in chunks. I grabbed a metal scraper and removed the lot. Car body filler it is!

Filled and sanded down that was one panel complete. It was far from perfect, but by this point i'd spend days on one panel and I just wanted to move on. A few of the perforated air holes in the bottom right corner do show in the final product, but it wasn't too noticeable.
 
Next up we have the left side panel. Didn't get too many images of this, must have been too busy playing with power tools. So unfortunately this action shot is all you're getting.
 
 
Finally we have the front face. I decided I wanted to swap the power buttons for some light up push to make switches, so back out comes the filler so we can flatten everything off. This time I'd learned from my mistakes, so I used the car body filler to do the majority of the filling, then a light coat of the spray to fill in some imperfections after i'd done the first pass of sanding.

 
I knew airflow was a thing, so I knew I had to make some holes for some front intake fans. I decided to just follow the contours of the front panel and settled on a pair of eyes. 

 
Back out with the Dremel and we're all done and ready for the paint.
 

 
 
Now the original idea was to place a decal on the right panel. I'd purchased some transfer paper, and printed out a test sheet to make sure I had it sized perfectly. I'd edited the image to remove the black background (since the case was black) so you have to imagine the white paper would be transparent. 

 
As it turned out, the image didn't really work. The blues and greens were very dull when printed and I scraped the idea. The right side wouldn't be on show anyway, i'd had my parts for over a week and it was itching to get this thing up and running. So the case get's reassembled, parts put in and booted up.
 
Unfortunately I didn't get any images of putting the parts in the case. I was probably too worried about messing it all up at this stage, which I did do very spectacularly when on first switch on the case filled with smoke and I poo'd myself. Whilst funny looking back now, you can imagine the horror when I thought I'd somehow blew up my components. As it turned out, I stupidly didn't insulate the bare wire power cables for the button led's on the front which must have caused some arcing as the plastic had melted on the back of the switches. Luckily no serious problems, the led's were gone (and I never got around to fixing them) but pulled the power cables off and it booted up fine.
 
So here's the final result. Far from refined, loads of imperfections and not very good at cable management but none of that mattered to me. It looked awesome, blew my old PC out the water and lasted me many years. I don't remember ever throwing it away so it's probably buried in my parents attic somewhere. Be interesting to dig it out and see if it still works.
 

Enjoy

Go for it

1. had the q300l housing my old htpc with an i5-4590 and a gtx 960, lots of airflow and temps below 70 all the time. i just grabbed a cheap 120mm fan i had lying around and added it to the front of the case.
 
2. a cheap 120mm fan should cost you less than 10 bucks
 
3. not that i know of

Thanks for the advice. I remember watching that video now you've quoted it. So when you talk about adequate airflow, you're primarily looking at where the air vents are in the case and where fans can be mounted in relation to them. I think even I can just about understand that
 
Going to start putting together some builds today so I'll be putting the advice into action. We'll see if I really understood it when I post asking for feedback before purchase
 

Hi everyone! Since i've just started to look into building a budget rig a whole decade after I last built a PC I thought i'd share in my little nostalgia trip. Please note all these images were taken on a dirt cheap Fuji digital camera or worse a mobile phone (don't forget it was 2006). They are pretty bad quality, small and i've had to crop some of them heavily (I never took them with the intention of sharing online).
 
Just to set the scene, I was fresh out of school, working 12 hour factory shifts for £3/hr saving what I could to build myself my first PC. It took me months of saving up but I eventually had enough to place my parts order. I'd never spent so much money in one go and I still remember spending literally hours staring at the checkout cart convincing myself to press the buy button. Obviously I did it in the end, otherwise this would be a very boring post indeed.
 

There's some additional parts I bought from other vendors like a CPU cooler, cables and a fan controller, but only this vendor would show me my order history going so far back. I believe the total build cost was around the £600 mark.
 
Parts delivered, I was clearly too excited to take a bundle shot, but I did find a shot of the CPU and Mobo. I still have all the boxes for this build in my parents attic.

 
So what are we putting all this gear into you might be wondering? A Thermaltake Soprano? A Coolermaster Storm?! Possibly one of those aluminium Lian-Li cases that were super light weight?...
 
None of those! I had this

 
Of course I wasn't going to leave it like that. I didn't really know what I was going to turn it into, but I was young, had zero DIY skills, no workshop, and the key's to my dads toolbox. Who wouldn't decide to wing it on a custom case modding project!
 
My rough idea was to flatten the side panels, put in a window, add some lights and transfer a decal of space gas cloud I had an odd obsession with at the time. So let's get started!
 
Step 1 was to flatten the right side panel. This should have been the easiest job. Fill it, sand it and paint it. Because the impression was only a couple millimeters deep I decided to opt for a spray on filler.

 
That was an absolutely stupid idea. A couple of millimeters might not sound like a lot, but it took 1 and half tins of spray on filler and 2 days of spraying and drying cycles to build it up. Oh and to top it off, it never turned fully solid for sanding. It kept this rubbery texture. I assume the spray can fillers are meant for scratch filling...
 
Anyway, after trying to sand it down and the filler just clogging the sand paper or coming off in chunks. I grabbed a metal scraper and removed the lot. Car body filler it is!

Filled and sanded down that was one panel complete. It was far from perfect, but by this point i'd spend days on one panel and I just wanted to move on. A few of the perforated air holes in the bottom right corner do show in the final product, but it wasn't too noticeable.
 
Next up we have the left side panel. Didn't get too many images of this, must have been too busy playing with power tools. So unfortunately this action shot is all you're getting.
 
 
Finally we have the front face. I decided I wanted to swap the power buttons for some light up push to make switches, so back out comes the filler so we can flatten everything off. This time I'd learned from my mistakes, so I used the car body filler to do the majority of the filling, then a light coat of the spray to fill in some imperfections after i'd done the first pass of sanding.

 
I knew airflow was a thing, so I knew I had to make some holes for some front intake fans. I decided to just follow the contours of the front panel and settled on a pair of eyes. 

 
Back out with the Dremel and we're all done and ready for the paint.
 

 
 
Now the original idea was to place a decal on the right panel. I'd purchased some transfer paper, and printed out a test sheet to make sure I had it sized perfectly. I'd edited the image to remove the black background (since the case was black) so you have to imagine the white paper would be transparent. 

 
As it turned out, the image didn't really work. The blues and greens were very dull when printed and I scraped the idea. The right side wouldn't be on show anyway, i'd had my parts for over a week and it was itching to get this thing up and running. So the case get's reassembled, parts put in and booted up.
 
Unfortunately I didn't get any images of putting the parts in the case. I was probably too worried about messing it all up at this stage, which I did do very spectacularly when on first switch on the case filled with smoke and I poo'd myself. Whilst funny looking back now, you can imagine the horror when I thought I'd somehow blew up my components. As it turned out, I stupidly didn't insulate the bare wire power cables for the button led's on the front which must have caused some arcing as the plastic had melted on the back of the switches. Luckily no serious problems, the led's were gone (and I never got around to fixing them) but pulled the power cables off and it booted up fine.
 
So here's the final result. Far from refined, loads of imperfections and not very good at cable management but none of that mattered to me. It looked awesome, blew my old PC out the water and lasted me many years. I don't remember ever throwing it away so it's probably buried in my parents attic somewhere. Be interesting to dig it out and see if it still works.
 

Hi everyone! Since i've just started to look into building a budget rig a whole decade after I last built a PC I thought i'd share in my little nostalgia trip. Please note all these images were taken on a dirt cheap Fuji digital camera or worse a mobile phone (don't forget it was 2006). They are pretty bad quality, small and i've had to crop some of them heavily (I never took them with the intention of sharing online).
 
Just to set the scene, I was fresh out of school, working 12 hour factory shifts for £3/hr saving what I could to build myself my first PC. It took me months of saving up but I eventually had enough to place my parts order. I'd never spent so much money in one go and I still remember spending literally hours staring at the checkout cart convincing myself to press the buy button. Obviously I did it in the end, otherwise this would be a very boring post indeed.
 

There's some additional parts I bought from other vendors like a CPU cooler, cables and a fan controller, but only this vendor would show me my order history going so far back. I believe the total build cost was around the £600 mark.
 
Parts delivered, I was clearly too excited to take a bundle shot, but I did find a shot of the CPU and Mobo. I still have all the boxes for this build in my parents attic.

 
So what are we putting all this gear into you might be wondering? A Thermaltake Soprano? A Coolermaster Storm?! Possibly one of those aluminium Lian-Li cases that were super light weight?...
 
None of those! I had this

 
Of course I wasn't going to leave it like that. I didn't really know what I was going to turn it into, but I was young, had zero DIY skills, no workshop, and the key's to my dads toolbox. Who wouldn't decide to wing it on a custom case modding project!
 
My rough idea was to flatten the side panels, put in a window, add some lights and transfer a decal of space gas cloud I had an odd obsession with at the time. So let's get started!
 
Step 1 was to flatten the right side panel. This should have been the easiest job. Fill it, sand it and paint it. Because the impression was only a couple millimeters deep I decided to opt for a spray on filler.

 
That was an absolutely stupid idea. A couple of millimeters might not sound like a lot, but it took 1 and half tins of spray on filler and 2 days of spraying and drying cycles to build it up. Oh and to top it off, it never turned fully solid for sanding. It kept this rubbery texture. I assume the spray can fillers are meant for scratch filling...
 
Anyway, after trying to sand it down and the filler just clogging the sand paper or coming off in chunks. I grabbed a metal scraper and removed the lot. Car body filler it is!

Filled and sanded down that was one panel complete. It was far from perfect, but by this point i'd spend days on one panel and I just wanted to move on. A few of the perforated air holes in the bottom right corner do show in the final product, but it wasn't too noticeable.
 
Next up we have the left side panel. Didn't get too many images of this, must have been too busy playing with power tools. So unfortunately this action shot is all you're getting.
 
 
Finally we have the front face. I decided I wanted to swap the power buttons for some light up push to make switches, so back out comes the filler so we can flatten everything off. This time I'd learned from my mistakes, so I used the car body filler to do the majority of the filling, then a light coat of the spray to fill in some imperfections after i'd done the first pass of sanding.

 
I knew airflow was a thing, so I knew I had to make some holes for some front intake fans. I decided to just follow the contours of the front panel and settled on a pair of eyes. 

 
Back out with the Dremel and we're all done and ready for the paint.
 

 
 
Now the original idea was to place a decal on the right panel. I'd purchased some transfer paper, and printed out a test sheet to make sure I had it sized perfectly. I'd edited the image to remove the black background (since the case was black) so you have to imagine the white paper would be transparent. 

 
As it turned out, the image didn't really work. The blues and greens were very dull when printed and I scraped the idea. The right side wouldn't be on show anyway, i'd had my parts for over a week and it was itching to get this thing up and running. So the case get's reassembled, parts put in and booted up.
 
Unfortunately I didn't get any images of putting the parts in the case. I was probably too worried about messing it all up at this stage, which I did do very spectacularly when on first switch on the case filled with smoke and I poo'd myself. Whilst funny looking back now, you can imagine the horror when I thought I'd somehow blew up my components. As it turned out, I stupidly didn't insulate the bare wire power cables for the button led's on the front which must have caused some arcing as the plastic had melted on the back of the switches. Luckily no serious problems, the led's were gone (and I never got around to fixing them) but pulled the power cables off and it booted up fine.
 
So here's the final result. Far from refined, loads of imperfections and not very good at cable management but none of that mattered to me. It looked awesome, blew my old PC out the water and lasted me many years. I don't remember ever throwing it away so it's probably buried in my parents attic somewhere. Be interesting to dig it out and see if it still works.
 

Hi everyone! Since i've just started to look into building a budget rig a whole decade after I last built a PC I thought i'd share in my little nostalgia trip. Please note all these images were taken on a dirt cheap Fuji digital camera or worse a mobile phone (don't forget it was 2006). They are pretty bad quality, small and i've had to crop some of them heavily (I never took them with the intention of sharing online).
 
Just to set the scene, I was fresh out of school, working 12 hour factory shifts for £3/hr saving what I could to build myself my first PC. It took me months of saving up but I eventually had enough to place my parts order. I'd never spent so much money in one go and I still remember spending literally hours staring at the checkout cart convincing myself to press the buy button. Obviously I did it in the end, otherwise this would be a very boring post indeed.
 

There's some additional parts I bought from other vendors like a CPU cooler, cables and a fan controller, but only this vendor would show me my order history going so far back. I believe the total build cost was around the £600 mark.
 
Parts delivered, I was clearly too excited to take a bundle shot, but I did find a shot of the CPU and Mobo. I still have all the boxes for this build in my parents attic.

 
So what are we putting all this gear into you might be wondering? A Thermaltake Soprano? A Coolermaster Storm?! Possibly one of those aluminium Lian-Li cases that were super light weight?...
 
None of those! I had this

 
Of course I wasn't going to leave it like that. I didn't really know what I was going to turn it into, but I was young, had zero DIY skills, no workshop, and the key's to my dads toolbox. Who wouldn't decide to wing it on a custom case modding project!
 
My rough idea was to flatten the side panels, put in a window, add some lights and transfer a decal of space gas cloud I had an odd obsession with at the time. So let's get started!
 
Step 1 was to flatten the right side panel. This should have been the easiest job. Fill it, sand it and paint it. Because the impression was only a couple millimeters deep I decided to opt for a spray on filler.

 
That was an absolutely stupid idea. A couple of millimeters might not sound like a lot, but it took 1 and half tins of spray on filler and 2 days of spraying and drying cycles to build it up. Oh and to top it off, it never turned fully solid for sanding. It kept this rubbery texture. I assume the spray can fillers are meant for scratch filling...
 
Anyway, after trying to sand it down and the filler just clogging the sand paper or coming off in chunks. I grabbed a metal scraper and removed the lot. Car body filler it is!

Filled and sanded down that was one panel complete. It was far from perfect, but by this point i'd spend days on one panel and I just wanted to move on. A few of the perforated air holes in the bottom right corner do show in the final product, but it wasn't too noticeable.
 
Next up we have the left side panel. Didn't get too many images of this, must have been too busy playing with power tools. So unfortunately this action shot is all you're getting.
 
 
Finally we have the front face. I decided I wanted to swap the power buttons for some light up push to make switches, so back out comes the filler so we can flatten everything off. This time I'd learned from my mistakes, so I used the car body filler to do the majority of the filling, then a light coat of the spray to fill in some imperfections after i'd done the first pass of sanding.

 
I knew airflow was a thing, so I knew I had to make some holes for some front intake fans. I decided to just follow the contours of the front panel and settled on a pair of eyes. 

 
Back out with the Dremel and we're all done and ready for the paint.
 

 
 
Now the original idea was to place a decal on the right panel. I'd purchased some transfer paper, and printed out a test sheet to make sure I had it sized perfectly. I'd edited the image to remove the black background (since the case was black) so you have to imagine the white paper would be transparent. 

 
As it turned out, the image didn't really work. The blues and greens were very dull when printed and I scraped the idea. The right side wouldn't be on show anyway, i'd had my parts for over a week and it was itching to get this thing up and running. So the case get's reassembled, parts put in and booted up.
 
Unfortunately I didn't get any images of putting the parts in the case. I was probably too worried about messing it all up at this stage, which I did do very spectacularly when on first switch on the case filled with smoke and I poo'd myself. Whilst funny looking back now, you can imagine the horror when I thought I'd somehow blew up my components. As it turned out, I stupidly didn't insulate the bare wire power cables for the button led's on the front which must have caused some arcing as the plastic had melted on the back of the switches. Luckily no serious problems, the led's were gone (and I never got around to fixing them) but pulled the power cables off and it booted up fine.
 
So here's the final result. Far from refined, loads of imperfections and not very good at cable management but none of that mattered to me. It looked awesome, blew my old PC out the water and lasted me many years. I don't remember ever throwing it away so it's probably buried in my parents attic somewhere. Be interesting to dig it out and see if it still works.
 

Hi everyone! Since i've just started to look into building a budget rig a whole decade after I last built a PC I thought i'd share in my little nostalgia trip. Please note all these images were taken on a dirt cheap Fuji digital camera or worse a mobile phone (don't forget it was 2006). They are pretty bad quality, small and i've had to crop some of them heavily (I never took them with the intention of sharing online).
 
Just to set the scene, I was fresh out of school, working 12 hour factory shifts for £3/hr saving what I could to build myself my first PC. It took me months of saving up but I eventually had enough to place my parts order. I'd never spent so much money in one go and I still remember spending literally hours staring at the checkout cart convincing myself to press the buy button. Obviously I did it in the end, otherwise this would be a very boring post indeed.
 

There's some additional parts I bought from other vendors like a CPU cooler, cables and a fan controller, but only this vendor would show me my order history going so far back. I believe the total build cost was around the £600 mark.
 
Parts delivered, I was clearly too excited to take a bundle shot, but I did find a shot of the CPU and Mobo. I still have all the boxes for this build in my parents attic.

 
So what are we putting all this gear into you might be wondering? A Thermaltake Soprano? A Coolermaster Storm?! Possibly one of those aluminium Lian-Li cases that were super light weight?...
 
None of those! I had this

 
Of course I wasn't going to leave it like that. I didn't really know what I was going to turn it into, but I was young, had zero DIY skills, no workshop, and the key's to my dads toolbox. Who wouldn't decide to wing it on a custom case modding project!
 
My rough idea was to flatten the side panels, put in a window, add some lights and transfer a decal of space gas cloud I had an odd obsession with at the time. So let's get started!
 
Step 1 was to flatten the right side panel. This should have been the easiest job. Fill it, sand it and paint it. Because the impression was only a couple millimeters deep I decided to opt for a spray on filler.

 
That was an absolutely stupid idea. A couple of millimeters might not sound like a lot, but it took 1 and half tins of spray on filler and 2 days of spraying and drying cycles to build it up. Oh and to top it off, it never turned fully solid for sanding. It kept this rubbery texture. I assume the spray can fillers are meant for scratch filling...
 
Anyway, after trying to sand it down and the filler just clogging the sand paper or coming off in chunks. I grabbed a metal scraper and removed the lot. Car body filler it is!

Filled and sanded down that was one panel complete. It was far from perfect, but by this point i'd spend days on one panel and I just wanted to move on. A few of the perforated air holes in the bottom right corner do show in the final product, but it wasn't too noticeable.
 
Next up we have the left side panel. Didn't get too many images of this, must have been too busy playing with power tools. So unfortunately this action shot is all you're getting.
 
 
Finally we have the front face. I decided I wanted to swap the power buttons for some light up push to make switches, so back out comes the filler so we can flatten everything off. This time I'd learned from my mistakes, so I used the car body filler to do the majority of the filling, then a light coat of the spray to fill in some imperfections after i'd done the first pass of sanding.

 
I knew airflow was a thing, so I knew I had to make some holes for some front intake fans. I decided to just follow the contours of the front panel and settled on a pair of eyes. 

 
Back out with the Dremel and we're all done and ready for the paint.
 

 
 
Now the original idea was to place a decal on the right panel. I'd purchased some transfer paper, and printed out a test sheet to make sure I had it sized perfectly. I'd edited the image to remove the black background (since the case was black) so you have to imagine the white paper would be transparent. 

 
As it turned out, the image didn't really work. The blues and greens were very dull when printed and I scraped the idea. The right side wouldn't be on show anyway, i'd had my parts for over a week and it was itching to get this thing up and running. So the case get's reassembled, parts put in and booted up.
 
Unfortunately I didn't get any images of putting the parts in the case. I was probably too worried about messing it all up at this stage, which I did do very spectacularly when on first switch on the case filled with smoke and I poo'd myself. Whilst funny looking back now, you can imagine the horror when I thought I'd somehow blew up my components. As it turned out, I stupidly didn't insulate the bare wire power cables for the button led's on the front which must have caused some arcing as the plastic had melted on the back of the switches. Luckily no serious problems, the led's were gone (and I never got around to fixing them) but pulled the power cables off and it booted up fine.
 
So here's the final result. Far from refined, loads of imperfections and not very good at cable management but none of that mattered to me. It looked awesome, blew my old PC out the water and lasted me many years. I don't remember ever throwing it away so it's probably buried in my parents attic somewhere. Be interesting to dig it out and see if it still works.
 

Generally for very high end hardware builds, I look for a fully mesh or perforated panel (Primary intake; can be front, bottom or side. Sometimes the Top) for unobstructed airflow for the fans. For mid-ranged builds (IE: R5 3600 and a RX580, 590 or GTX1660 (variant) I look for at least good side vents with the fans properly positioned that allow them to draw air into the case (Fractal Design Define C and the NZXT H500 are good examples of this). For a super budget web browser, airflow is basically a non factor, the cheapest microATX with glossy black front panels thats has no air vents from Newegg is just fine. 
 
Hence the emphasis on Adequate airflow. Because some people will just mash "Meshify C or Bust" like it's a macro. 
 
Cables actually have zero impact on the airflow in your case. Cable management is purely an aesthetic thing (so long as they're not getting into fan blades) and things like Hard drive cages, restrictive front panels or crappy fans are usually the cause of poor airflow. 
 

I chose the Phanteks P400 series for it's build quality, cable management, expandability for HDDs, and the looks. I have since upgraded the solid front panel to the mesh panel found on the P400A to improve airflow. Absolutely love that case now. 

Always Considered:
Holds hardware required Adequate Airflow for the planned build Cable management options Extra fans if any Price Sometimes Considered:
Size (full towers are rarely considered) Expandability/Hardware change compatible (IE: bigger coolers or more hard drives) Color Options Style/Aesthetics Tempered Glass Panel Rarely Considered:
RGB Anything made by Inwin or EVGA

1.Price
2. Has good airflow
3. Is a boring box without windows and stuff
4. Size. So I can tuck it away so it's not in the way or so I don't need to look at it.

1.) Price Bracket
2.) Airflow (I prefer cases with front and side intake, top and rear exhaust available)
3.) Radiator placement options (cause Im into water cooling atm this option would change to cooler clearance if I was into air cooling)
 

I've always been a sucker for ITX cases. I personally like to make sure my cases have decent enough air flow, will aesthetically fit into my space, and have support for my planned cooling method. If you want to go ITX I would recommend NZXT's H210. It's not too pricey, support air coolers, and an ATX power supply. This keeps the ITX Tax confined to just your motherboard. 

The only things I think about are;
 
1. Price?
2. Does it have any airflow?
3. Is it a Lian Li PC O-11?