Thermaltake Lanbox Lite
4. Conclusion
Thermaltake has made a very interesting proposal for those wanting to add gaming to their small form factor home entertainment PC. The Lanbox Lite case is bigger than your standard SFF case, just big enough to hold an extra large VGA card, like Nvidia's 8800GTX. Its main strengths are its very good modular design and of course the fact that everything can be installed very easily without a lot of knowledge of PC assembly. You probably need a screwdriver just to remove the HDD case, but all others are thumb screws.
This box can accommodate only Micro ATX form factor & mini ITX form factor motherboards. There are two 5.25" storage bays at the front and it can hold up to three HDDs. This means that it's futureproof for most users and covers even the highest needs of most enthusiasts. What we didn't like is the fact that the HDD case has no vibration absorption, and with our installation, our WD Raptor HDD made a lot of noise that transferred to the case. That should have been taken care of by Thermaltake. With "standard sized" optical storage drives, there is also not much room left between the storage bay and the power supply. However, most currently sold optical drives have a slim design so that is not a major problem.
The following picture gives an indication of what you can fit, more or less, in a Lanbox Lite.
Overall, we are very satisfied with Thermaltake's Lanbox Lite case. It is rated for SFF use, although it's not as small as you may think, but it will cover most of your needs. The retail price is not that high either. You can buy the case at a retail price of $90, without the power supply of course. If you are looking for a SFF case with more room and features than the usual SFF for Micro ATX, then you need look no further.