Chassis: chassis styles

Chassis style refers to the appearance style of the chassis. Its basic forms are vertical and horizontal. Other chassis with different shapes are basically developed from these two forms, such as 1U blade server chassis and cabinet chassis.

Horizontal cabinet
The horizontal chassis has occupied most of the chassis market for a long time after the emergence of computers. The horizontal chassis is small in appearance, and has a stronger sense of integration for the appearance of the whole computer than the vertical chassis. Moreover, because the display can be placed on the chassis, it takes up less space. However, compared with the vertical chassis, the horizontal chassis has obvious disadvantages: poor scalability and ventilation and cooling performance, which also lead to the horizontal chassis being gradually replaced by the vertical chassis in the mainstream market. Generally speaking, only a few commercial computers and teaching computers now use horizontal chassis.

tower case
Although the history of vertical chassis (sometimes called tower chassis) is much shorter than that of horizontal chassis, its scalability and ventilation and cooling performance are much better than that of horizontal chassis. Therefore, since the Pentium era, the vertical chassis has become so popular that now the vertical chassis has become deeply rooted in people's minds. Vertical chassis can be divided into full height, 3/4 height, half height, Micro ATX and other types according to the appearance size. The full height chassis has strong expandability and large space, and is suitable for server use. The half height and 3/4 height chassis have moderate scalability, and the space is relatively spacious for desktop use. However, Micro ATX chassis has poor expandability and small space, which is only applicable to brand computers that pursue appearance.