We’ve seen flatpack PC cases emerge in the last year. So, how about an unfoldable? Assembling your own PC case from panels and parts might be a perfect “extra fun” task if ordinary PC builds have become mundane. This kind of assembly doesn’t require greater technical knowledge and is hard to do incorrectly. Enter the $239.99 InWin POC One, an upper-crustier version of its earlier, cheaper POC-case-family effort. Building it out is easy; the challenge lies in fitting big components into tiny spaces. If you’re up for it, the POC One might just be your cup of (write in your favorite beverage) if you’re after a vertical-orientation case with a unique semi-industrial look.The Design: Two Back EndsAt roughly half the depth and most of the height of a classic mid-tower, the POC One stands with cases like the SilverStone Alta G1M and Raijintech Ophion Elite in basic layout, apart from one major discrepancy: The power supply mounts on its right side, beneath its exhaust fan mount. The design suggests that you’ll be shoving the thing into a corner, to the right of your keyboard and mouse, which would put its front-panel connectors within easy reach and allow you a good view of its side window.
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(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)
Those connectors include two USB 3.x Type-A ports, a four-pole headset (headphone/microphone combo) jack and a USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 Type-C, all lined up behind the power button. Those looking a bit more closely at the photo might notice that two of the vent perforations are oval rather than round: That’s a reflection of the 240mm radiator mount on the opposite side. The vents on this side cover the graphics card chamber.
(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)
Indeed, on this case, what looks like the bottom is actually the top: While upward-facing port I/O panels are relatively common on small-footprint towers, the POC One is the first we’ve seen to leave that space uncovered, its cable hold-down hooks exposed. With only 1.8 inches of space between the graphics card I/O and the case’s top edge, and an even narrower 1.1-inch gap for motherboard I/O, covering those cable ends would have required a fairly thick 3D panel such as the one seen on the competing Thermaltake The Tower 300. Alternatively, InWin could have flipped the case and made the edges an inch longer. (Or not. Our motherboard and graphics I/O isn’t that ugly.) But know that looking down onto this case from the top will expose all that grisly cabling.
(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)
We don’t normally cover the case “unboxing” experience, and sites that do tend to lead with that aspect. But we wanted to get a general description of the case in front of you before discussing how it’s put together. So here goes, and here’s the box…
(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)
The POC One’s packaging fairly well violates the idea that shipping the case flat will save on packaging, as it contains as much packaging as most of the big PC cases we’ve tested. We’re talking about two thick layers of box-engulfing closed-cell foam, sandwiched between top and bottom layers of closed-cell foam.
(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)
(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)
As you can see, the panels are held together and hinged on the long edges with synthetic-material tubes. We’re not sure that looping all the panels together made it any easier to assemble the POC One, compared with the loose panels used in the InWin Airforce or Cooler Master Qube 500. They do make the machine a bit harder to service after the fact, as the window that covers the motherboard compartment (the leftmost panel, below) hangs from the screwed-down panel that allows access above the motherboard, and the same is true for the door that covers the graphics card (the rightmost panel, below). Pay close attention to the tabs on the edges of the thin black (steel) panels, as those fit into grooves machined into the thicker matching aluminum panels.
(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)
Components include a PCI Express 4.0 riser cable, an offset ATX-to-SFX power-supply adapter plate, three flat and six angled rubber feet, and the front-panel port and button assembly. Then there’s a ton of small bits, making for one of the most complex accessory kits you’ll see in any PC case: A bag of special decorative screws for the aluminum panelsA bag of every other kind of screw needed to assemble a system within the caseFour hook-and-loop (possibly Velcro-brand) cable tiesSeveral zip-style cable tiesFour magnetsTwo handlesTwo flat and one hex-key wrenchesAn adhesive rubber qNe (a stylized “ONE”) badgeTwo sheets of removable rubber port plugsFour long standoffs for connecting the back panel to the motherboard tray over the motherboard compartmentFour medium standoffs for connecting the front panel to the back of the motherboard tray over the graphics card compartmentFour short standoffs for adding handlesA Jupiter AJ120 ARGB cooling fan with its own screw pack
(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)
We found the POC One’s manual useful only for documenting components, and this folding case demo video the only instructive media for its actual assembly.Building Inside the InWin POC One: Flip Out and MountWith this chassis, we get to unveil the final new component of our 2024 case-testing configuration, Asus’ ROG Strix Z790-I Gaming WiFi, noting that the case’s use of a vertically mounted graphics card via a riser cable is probably the only thing that keeps this mainboard not ideally suited for this purpose.
(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)
We will reach a point in the build where we figure out that our liquid cooling radiator won’t clear the full-size power supply that we’ve been using on larger cases. This is where InWin’s offset SFX PSU adapter comes into play: It gives us an extra inch of space. Cooler Master provided the more-compact power supply we ultimately used and listed below. Here’s a summary of the parts we used in our test config…
We found that the right-angle 12VHPWR cable included with our power supply did not work with the position of our RTX 4070 Ti card within the POC One due to its proximity to the back of the motherboard tray. The 450W cable of our full-size 850W sample featured the same 90-degree connector, and flipping that cable to place its right-angle end on the PSU side wouldn’t work because it ended up facing the power supply’s main (24-pin) power connections. Digging through other hardware we had, we found a needed 12VHPWR cable with a straight-through connector; if you get similarly stuck, standardized 12VHPWR cables are available for less than $20.
(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)
Even with the cable trouble sorted, we still ended up rebuilding our POC One test configuration several times before we got past the black screens. With the panel that covers the motherboard bolted down and our radiator bolted to that, simple diagnostics aren’t so simple.
(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)
We said that there wasn’t enough cable space to use the POC One upside down, but we found a short-connector HDMI cable and tried it anyway, by plugging our keyboard and mouse into front-panel ports. Notice that on the inverted case (below, at right), the farthest side panel is marked for foot alignment: We just peeled those feet and stuck them to the top edges before inverting the case.
(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)
The POC One is also designed for horizontal orientation; here, you’d be using its handles as raised feet, as you can see below, and as airflow-space creators for the radiator mount’s vents, with the repositioned handle reducing the case’s horizontal configuration from InWin’s specified 11.9-inch thickness to 11.1 inches. Our greatest concern is that our closed-loop cooler’s pump is now at the loop’s highest point: Most liquid coolers have at least a small air bubble inside that tends to rise to the top of the loop, and pumps can’t pump air. Our graphics card fans are also blowing downward, but resisting convection seems a far less troublesome matter than dealing with a paused pump.
(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)
You may ask why we didn’t simply flip the horizontal config? It’s because laying the case down put its power button and front-panel ports on top: Putting those things underneath the case would be, shall we say, very inconvenient.As the only other Mini-ITX case we’ve tested of late to use a PCIe 4.0 riser cable, we dragged Lian Li’s aging A4-H2O from mothballs to compare. By coincidence, our specific graphics card matches the exact limits of this older, smaller case, pictured below.
(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)
Testing the InWin POC One: All the OrientationsThe POC One performs best while standing up. The POC One’s CPU temperatures matched the Lian Li A4-H2O when laying horizontally. GPU temperatures are the bitter finding, as the heat pipe cooler of our particular test graphics card appears to be gravity-fed: The graphics card’s heat-pipe risers point downward from the heat source when the POC One is positioned vertically, and GPU temperatures climb by 23 degrees. Inverting the case fixes the issue. (We’ve seen this before.) That’s the main reason we wanted to test this case vertically, vertically inverted, and horizontally.
Then there’s our acoustic testing…
It’s not quiet, but the POC One may be quiet enough, depending on your cooling solution and software load. It certainly beats the Lian Li A4-H2O, but that’s mostly because our graphics card’s fans were close enough to the A4-H2O’s side panel to cause windage noise.Verdict: Bringing Your PC Into the FoldWhile the POC One looks great, its performance is unremarkable. That makes us feel a little sad, since it carries such a premium price. Even so, you can’t find a PC case that looks much like this one at any price. More so than most PC cases, the POC One will be an emotional decision more than a practical one. If you value the unique look, the foldout fun factor, or perhaps the ability to turn this into a family project, the few extra $20 bills will be a mere middling hurdle to jumping in with InWin’s quirky effort. If nothing else, it will reward this chance-taking case maker in the same sense that one may reward a Kickstarter even if they’re not all-in for the final product; few other PC-case makers bring as many cool moonshots to market as InWin does.
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