Mini-Towers: Advanteges and Disadvantages

Of the three most common PC tower types Mini-Towers are the least talked about because they aren't really designed to be high performance PC's. I may have said this before but a good thing to ask yourself when choosing a PC Tower is, what does it need to do? There is niche where Mini-Tower PC's come in, they are often used in non-conventional environments. For instance many restaurant use point-of-sale units  that are comprised of a touch screen and a mini-tower PC. Also many call centers across the world use mini-tower PC's because the agents often times don't need a lot of processing power and they work in small cubical.

Here are the two main advantages to purchasing a Mini-Tower PC

• Smaller Footprint (takes less space)
• Portability

Many manufacturing and specialized environments  like Mini-Towers because they can put them wherever they need them and they are very easy to move around. The advantages of Mini-Towers are not very impressive and rightly so. These towers were never designed to impress, they were designed for situational efficiency.

Disadvantages to Mini-Towers

• Assembly and Upgrading
• Cooling (or the lack of)
• Pricing (you get a lot less bang per buck)

Of the disadvantages of Mini-Towers assembly and upgrade is clearly the worst. If you've ever worked on a Mini-Tower you know exactly what I am talking about. The smaller form factor of the Mini-tower doesn't allow for expansion slots, extra drive bays, extra USB ports, firewire ports and cooling.  Plus switching out bad components is a nightmare because there is no room for your hands or any other tool. Its pretty obvious why Mini-Towers aren't really  a consumer favorite, remember to keep all these factor in mind if you're thinking about building a PC using a Mini-Tower.