These days, the top. Pretty close to it, too--other than the hardline tubing, that's about what my gaming setup looks like.

I've also ran systems in the past where the "case" is the box the motherboard came in, and you started it by tripping the switch header with whatever piece of metal was handy. Good times.

no glass, no worries

Most people build budget or best bang for their buck builds

I took tin snips to the GeForce 310 from my old family computer because I had a SFF PC and wanted a second monitor, so I guess I'm the latter

I cut a hole in the side of a NUC and wired a graphics card to the nvme port. It's stuck to the back of my monitor with velcro. It works.

There was the guy on reddit a week or so ago that was the fusion of these. Ran a custom cooling loop up his wall into the AC vent and got insanely low temps.

I just recently (a year ago) pulled my Phenom II x6 out of the old AT case to put in a Dell ATX, and bought a modern power-supply-on-bottom ATX case from Montech for like $100 because it had 6 RGB case fans preinstalled with a glass side panel. I gave the Phenom II x6 to my daughter with a 970 GTX, and got a cheap X570 motherboard and Ryzen 5 3600x to throw in the case. Cost me about $300 all said and done, because I already had all the rest of the stuff. A friend from the local hackerspace gave me his "old" 3060 12gb, because he was upgrading to a 4090, and I couldn't be happier. I feel like royalty rn even though I know it's not the best machine out there, lol

But the RGB button stays off. And I use a BRICK of an air cooler, it's like a knockoff Noctua D12

The first, but I pay someone to do it for me

I'm very satisfied with my build but my main issues are cables. The cables of the two CPU fans are way too long so they hang in a pretty non aesthetic way. On the other hand, the cables of the fan headers are too short for me to put them in the back of the case so it has to just stay there below my GPUs. It's awful.

I'll be the $5000 guy in the future.