Almost perfect – Jonsbo A4 case review

Sometimes there’s a product that you want to be good so bad that you’re willing to overlook some of the more glaring mistakes. That’s how I felt about the Jonsbo A4 ITX case. It’s a SFF (small form factor) m-ITX case that brings Jonsbo’s unique design aesthetics to user’s wanting a smaller foot print computer. Unfortunately, it’s not all tiny roses and sunshine.

Based on the design, the case it truly intended to be use with either a 120mm or 240mm AIO (all-in-one) liquid cooler. While AIO’s are fairly common in the current day, enthusiast are more often turning to creating custom loops in their build to maximize space efficiency. The “dream” CPU block from Barrow, that combines the pump, CPU plate, reservoir, is just 2mm too tall to fint into this case, which is a shame.

The biggest offender though, is the cable management. Or lack there of. With the case being so small, planning and routing cables is a the only way to be successful and that takes a lot of time. This is definitely not a case for the unitiated or faint of heart. It can be made into a beautiful build, but you’ll need to bring your A-game.

What are you’re thoughts? Is this your next ITX case or are the issues a deal breaker for you? Sound off in the comments here or in the YouTube comments section.

Check out the other Jonsbo case I’ve looked at, the late Jonsbo VR1

M1 Mac Mini – Apple’s gateway to the future

When Apple first announced its Apple Silicon a month ago, there were many questions and lots of apprehension. Like many of you, I was skeptical. To summarize the event, Apple highlighted a few key workflows running on the M1 chip. Then Apple showed us a bunch of unlabeled graphs touting superior performance over its intel counterparts. None of the presentation helped dispel my skepticism. Currently we are limited to either 8 or 16 GBs of memory that can only be upgraded at the time of purchase. There is no user upgradable memory, one of the downsides of having a SoC (System On a Chip). With that said, after a month of usage I can confidently say Apple is building toward the future and it’s looking bright!

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