If you are fond of hardware – and you probably are if you are reading this – it is likely that you have ever wondered why the vast majority of PC cases that have a side window have it on the left side and, in fact, the few models that have it on the right side are called “inverted.” As you well know, in the world of hardware everything has its reason for being and in this article we are going to tell you why boxes are designed in this way .
There are really very few boxes that over the years have been designed “inverted”, and more with a side window (in fact, I don’t remember any except the Corsair Carbide Clear 600C). For some reason, almost all PC users place the box to the right of the monitor and not to the left, but strange as this custom may seem, it is not the reason why the boxes have the side window on the left.
The motherboard, guilty of the location of the side advantage in the PC cases
As you read it, the “fault” that almost all cases have the side window on the left is because of how the PC motherboards are designed. Take a look, following the example of the Corsair Carbide Clear 600C that we mentioned before, as with the inverted design it is “forced” that the box does not have cooling at the top because there must be installed, by force, the power supply. power supply (it could be installed below, yes, but it would force the box to have a lot of height to leave enough distance with the plate and to be able to channel cables, etc.).
This would also make the liquid cooling radiators have to go on the bottom of the box, something that is not optimal for good airflow (or dust). On the other hand, the rear fan is in the lower area of the box, and if we take into account that hot air tends to rise and not to fall, it does not favor cooling, since it will not be able to efficiently eliminate the heat generated by the graphics card.
In short, you can still have a good box with good capacity and excellent cooling, but of course given the arrangement of the base plates it is not the most optimal and for this reason this type of inverted boxes is hardly manufactured.
And why is the arrangement of the motherboards not changed?
This would be quite tricky. The motherboard is by far the most complicated element of a PC, with countless different chips and connections that engineers have to fit together like a puzzle, with the addition that certain components have to be closer to each other to reduce latencies ( such as RAM memories or the main PCIe socket of the processor socket).
We could say that at present, although there is no standard, a “convention” has been reached between manufacturers and they all manufacture them with the same arrangement, since this is the best way to universalize in some way the PC components for that any motherboard can be installed in any box (with size restrictions, which is standardized), that any heatsink can be installed in any box (with the limitation of height), etc.
For example, imagine that now a manufacturer decided to change the arrangement of the output ports on the motherboard and instead of being on the left side, it was on the right. That would force you to install the motherboard rotated 180 degrees (“inverted”) and then the heatsink would no longer be oriented the same, the graphics card would be on top of the socket and would no longer fit into the PCI sockets of PC cases, etc.
In summary, PC cases have become universal to be able to install, with the restrictions that we all already know, any type of PC inside regardless of the manufacturer. And, as the manufacturers have also universalized the arrangement of the motherboards, there is no choice but to put the side window on the left side. Yes, there are inverted boxes, but as we explained at the beginning they are very few and their market release has been rather scarce, so in most cases they have ended up being discontinued and forgotten.
