Will the graphics card fit the case? How to check before you buy

The two figures to look at

Every case publishes these two numbers, and they are hard ceilings rather than suggestions.

• Maximum graphics card length (mm) — compare against the length of the card you intend to buy.
• Maximum cooler height (mm) — compare against the height of an air cooler.

A mistake that really happens

Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4090 GAMING OC 24GB is 340mm long. Here it is against four of the cases in this catalogue.

Ten millimetres cannot be pushed in. There is no fix other than a different card or a different case, and it is usually discovered with both of them already on the desk.

Cooler height is the one people forget

Most people can picture the length of a graphics card. Almost nobody checks cooler height, because a cooler looks like a small thing — right up until it goes into a small case.

Cooler Master MasterBox NR200P takes a cooler up to 153mm. DeepCool AK400 is 155mm tall — 2mm over, and the side panel will not close, even though both support the same socket and nothing in either spec sheet is wrong.

The fix in a small case is a low-profile cooler such as Thermalright AXP90-X47, which is only 47mm tall, or a liquid cooler, which puts nothing tall over the CPU at all.

The order that stops this happening

Choose the case before the graphics card. It sounds backwards, but doing it this way turns the case’s figures into a ceiling that filters cards from the start, instead of bad news afterwards.

On the build page, picking a case first removes every card that is too long from the list. You can still see them by ticking "Show models that do not fit too" — and it will tell you by how many millimetres.