The explosion in popularity of net books over the last 12 months should be proof enough of our love for all things tech and tiny, but the Mini-ITX form factor is also enjoying continued growth as people look to build their own mini media PCs or workstations.
Mini ITX doesn’t even mean compromising on components any more either, with fully featured boards like the socket AM2-based J&W MINIX 780G and LGA775 Zotac GeForce 9300-ITX (review soon!) offering big board performance and features in an ultra compact form factor. However, Intel’s Atom platform remains the more popular Mini-ITX choice thanks to its tiny cooling and power requirements combined with “good enough” performance and an exceptionally affordable price.
With this increasing interest in the Mini-ITX form factor, there has been a surprisingly small amount of new dedicated Mini-ITX chassis to house all those little motherboards. This is where case and cooling manufacturer Akasa is looking to step in with its Enigma Mini-ITX enclosure.
Mini ITX doesn’t even mean compromising on components any more either, with fully featured boards like the socket AM2-based J&W MINIX 780G and LGA775 Zotac GeForce 9300-ITX (review soon!) offering big board performance and features in an ultra compact form factor. However, Intel’s Atom platform remains the more popular Mini-ITX choice thanks to its tiny cooling and power requirements combined with “good enough” performance and an exceptionally affordable price. With this increasing interest in the Mini-ITX form factor, there has been a surprisingly small amount of new dedicated Mini-ITX chassis to house all those little motherboards. This is where case and cooling manufacturer Akasa is looking to step in with its Enigma Mini-ITX enclosure.
The case’s small size also means that there’s no option to fit expansion cards like sound cards or TV tuners. Even if you have a half height card and compatible board there’s simply no opening cut into the rear panel for it to fit into, leaving you only with the feature set that your Mini-ITX motherboard offers. Although Mini-ITX boards are becoming more and more impressive the omission of any space for expansion cards is something of a restrictive policy, but one that is mutually exclusive to the smallest of form factors. Akasa has been extremely ambitious with the Enigma’s tiny dimensions and there’s a whole lot to squeeze inside. To help accomplish this, there’s a three tiered system with the motherboard mounted directly onto the case’s panelling via pre-fitted motherboard risers and then the 2.5” HDD and slim optical drive mounted above them.
And it doesn’t really work too well we’re sad to report, with plenty of little niggles and annoyances helping to make the Enigma one of the most horrid cases we’ve ever fitted even a basic system into. Removing the drive mounting trays is easy enough, and so is angling in your Mini-ITX motherboard (we’re using a Gigabyte GA-GC23OD with a single core 1.6GHz Atom CPU), but problems soon arise when it comes to fitting the drives and their respective mounting systems.
In short, the Akasa Enigma is a huge disappointment. Not only is it extraordinarily cramped inside, making building even an Atom based system into it a difficult job, but it is poorly designed to the point that it merrily cooked our 1.6GHz 8W Atom CPU to within an inch of its life before we finally pulled the plug. While it might look the part with its miniature dimensions, numerous compromises have been made to keep the case as small as possible and these are obviously apparent.
