I remember a time when the case choice for your system depended greatly on your system components. If you opted to build a system with fast HDDs (usually several to store all the acquired data), then you needed a case with room to mount several fans to keep those multiple high speed, heat generating HDDs cool. If you opted for liquid cooling for your CPU, then you needed a place to mount a water radiator and pump; both already take a lot of room, and you still had to contend with the fluid hosing snaking throughout the case. Lastly you had to consider your VGA card length, as many older (and sometimes newer!) cards were long due to the number of discrete chips they used.

Fast forward to modern computer components and we still face similar considerations, but for totally different reasons. HDDs have increased in data and storage/retrieval speeds, but heat generation has been kept in check. Now users keep several HDDs for movies, pictures and other multimedia files with a reduced cooling requirement. Add the tremendous improvement in fan technology, and now we can use one or two case fans.

Looking at CPU and VGA cooling, we find options for heat pipe technology (which also use improved fans) to help remove the processor thermal component. The possibility of accomodating for a longer than standard video card remains unchanged, as it is no less likely that VGA cards will feature several large processor components needed to process displays on several monitors (or one large monitor).