I've been watching Colorfire's cat-themed Meow product line with much interest over the years. While I've already got a kitty-eared headset, I'm sure a full feline-themed set-up would help me achieve my final form as a hardware writer. The Meow series' ME26A PC case may prove the perfect canvas towards realising that dream.

In terms of styling, the ME26A is low-key compared to other entries in the Meow series. For starters, pizza-eating mascot Bobi is seemingly nowhere to be seen (unlike the Meow-X gaming PC set Colorfire showed off at last year's Computex). There's a very fun 'Meow'-shaped air grate on the front, and even a bit of tasteful wooden trim. The cat hasn't completely left the build, though.

The ME26A PC case also enjoys an almost subtle kitty paw motif, with orange decals on the chassis itself, just above the front I/O panel. Daubed in kitty pawprints, the front I/O features 1x USB-A, plus 1x USB-C port rated for up to 20 Gbps.

It also happens to feature one of the best power buttons I've ever seen—if I can start my day by squishing fake toe beans, I know it's going to be a good day (via VideoCardz).

Honestly, I already can't imagine a better thing to play Cat Mail Co. on, but let's talk case specs. Supporting both microATX and Mini-ITX motherboards, a cute, smaller form factor build is what the ME26A PC case aims for. That said, this case still supports standard-sized ATX power supplies, too. As for your all-important GPU, this case offers up to 435 mm of clearance—which is more than enough space for the Meow series' bright orange, twin-fan RTX 5050.

To keep everything cool, there's room for nine fans plus a 360 mm, top-mounted liquid cooler. Better yet, you won't be crying like a cat at dinner time trying to get inside the case to install these; the ME26A's dust filter and side panels can be popped off without the use of tools.

To burst my own bubble, though, Colorfire has not yet announced pricing information or region availability. Alas, my feline-themed build may be a dream I simply have to resign to the great cat bed in the sky.

Most PC components are skyrocketing in price this year, but there's one upgrade you can still make for surprisingly reasonable cash. Gaming PC cases are still very affordable in 2026, especially with decent discounts like the nine examples below.

Whether you're looking for more room for your rig's internals, shrinking your PC down to Micro-ATX size, improving airflow, or simply want a fresh new aesthetic for your beloved pee-cee, these deals should have you covered.

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The cheapest is this Micro-ATX offering from Cooler Master, priced at a mere $40 on Amazon right now. There are also plenty of Corsair cases to consider, including this mid-tower Corsair 3200D RX for $68, complete with three included 120 mm, RGB-lit fans.

Or you could go the whole hog and pick up our best PC case overall, the Corsair Air 5400 RS-R, for $200 at Walmart, a healthy saving over its usual $230 MSRP. Make sure to pay attention to the internal dimensions and specs before you go dropping your cash, as you'll want your hardware to fit inside your shiny new chassis. Otherwise? Have at it, folks.

Gaming PC case deals

They say fashion has a habit of repeating itself. What was once deemed gauche and detestable by one generation becomes the next's "big thing". Yep, like your grandad's long socks to Gen Z, and skinny jeans to Millennials, the big beige retro rig has landed square and center on our desks again, at the forefront of a manufacturing boom across the PC gaming sector, desperate to take its spot at the top of the best PC cases list across the world (yeah, I'm subtle).

Thermaltake's Retro 360 TG case is exactly that. Like the Silverstone FLP02 I reviewed earlier in the year, it looks to encapsulate that late 80s early 90s PC build nostalgia, complete with beige panels, and a touch of modernity to make your pc building endeavors at least somewhat more comfortable than it'd have been in a battered and bruised second-hand eBay purchase.

The good news is the Retro 360 TG is markedly cheaper than that Silverstone offering, coming in at a far lower price of around $92 or £90, depending on where you shop. For that, you get a super lightweight plastic chassis, with a steel frame, complete with easy access panels, and a full tempered glass side panel as well.

Hardware compatibility across the board is generally pretty good. You've got support for 360mm rads in both the top and the side of the case, and you can add an additional six 120mm fans total, along the floor of the PSU shroud, up the front intake, and on the rear as well.

It does come with two fairly mediocre 120mm DC fans as standard. One in the front and one in the rear, but they're not that exciting. Certainly not quite at the same caliber as those found in the FLP02.

Speed round, though. What's worse than two poorly calibrated DC fans? Not having access to good intake, that's what. Because, yep. Although the side, the roof, and the rear are fairly well ventilated (the roof even touting a magnetic, removable dust cover), the front is frankly a nightmare. The slatted white ventilation built into that plastic fascia restricts airflow quite heavily as it is, but there's also a healthy dose of mesh inside of it glued in place, and non-removable by design, limiting access further for whatever fans you do decide to install here. Not good.

Speaking of the front panel, it's entirely fake too. Something that, for some reason, I find particularly frustrating. In the case of the FLP02, it had full compatibility for 5.25-inch drive bays, with the housing and support internally there as well. The 360 TG mimics that mildly with a removable "disk drive" cutout, which you can replace with a 6-inch LCD screen (that Thermaltake sells separately), and then an entirely fake floppy drive that sits in situ just below. That, however, is fully molded into the panel itself, and non-removable. Complete with fake non-pressy button. That obviously, I tried to press.

Inside, it's a fairly basic affair too. You've got a motherboard tray with BTF support and plenty of cutouts for cables, and a PSU shroud, well ventilated too, and, well yeah, not much else. There's no cable grommets or clever engineering to hide your wires, it's all just bare metal and gaping holes until you get your motherboard into position.

Not a lot of thought has been given to those front fans either, as there's no logical way of routing the cables anywhere where you can hide them without them being on display. During my testing with the build process, I had to literally strap the single front fan's cable to the chassis with the included clear cable ties to keep it at least somewhat neat. Given the 360 TG has a window, this should've been managed far better than that. We're not going that retro that we're just trailing cables across the interior of the space after all, certainly not with that pristine window showing off everything inside.

Cable management around the back is limited too. There's no channeling or plastic covers, or anything outside a plethora of cable tie-down points. That's wild, given all of the front I/O cables are flat white variants as well. Like, someone somewhere purposely decided that pretty front I/O cables were more important than actual cable management solutions, and I just can't get my head around that.

So yeah, no anti-sag bracket, no hard drive cages, no fan controllers, no clever cable management solutions, just a few ties and some velcro strapping, along with some plain silver screws, and that's all she wrote. There ain't a whole lot to talk about that's for sure.

I get it, I sound like I'm wailing on it for the sake of it, but when you have such fierce competition in this industry right now, particularly in the budget segment with the likes of Phanteks and its XT V3 line, and Corsair, and everyone else under the sun delivering banger after banger at even more affordable price points, it's hard to let these design decisions just sail on by without critique.

The good news is, once you've built in it, it does look bloody slick. The mid-range ATX machine I slapped together in this really pops, particularly with the pink RGB, and I can almost forgo the fake front fascia elements to an extent when I forget about them. Combine that with that comfortable sub $100 price point, and it's well worth considering if you don't want to spend the big bucks on something like the FLP02. But, in many ways, the 360 TG feels like this Frankenstein's monster, blurring the lines between modern design and retro styling, yet without enough finesse to make either department really pop.

It's all very well and good perusing the Amazon Prime Day sales for deals on cold storage SSDs and high-end PC controllers, but it's not always the most exciting kit to cover as a hardware writer. Along similar lines, there's a whole lot of plain black PC cases in the Prime Day sales, so I definitely appreciate when hardware housing rocks up bucking this trend.

The Thermaltake Tower 600 series already gets a big tick from me for its fishtank flourish, but I'm also a big fan of the suite of colours available. Alas, there's only one case enjoying a discount on Amazon right now, and that's the 'Butter Caramel' colourway currently going for $130.

• We're curating all the best Prime Day PC gaming deals here

I've no doubt that's all the inspiration an entomologist who is also a fan of 90's Eurodance bangers will need to fashion the bumblebee-inspired build of their dreams. But you're getting a little more than just a fetching yellow colourway with this case. For a start, the Thermaltake Tower 600 supports hidden connector-style ATX motherboards with extra cutouts—for a case designed to put it all on display, this cable management flourish is definitely welcome.

This case comes with two 140 mm CT fans pre-installed in the top of the chassis. From there, you can then add your own up to a total of either nine 140 mm fans or 13 120 mm fans. You can also install either a 420 mm AIO radiator on the right side of this case, or a 360 mm AIO radiator on the left. As for the all-important GPU, the Thermaltake Tower 600 has room for cards up to 400 mm in length.

That's a fair amount of build flexibility, already. On top of that, the Tower 600 enjoys what Thermaltake bills as a 'Dismantlable Modular Design.' Basically, rather than tying yourself up in knots to get at, say, awkward screws, you can just deconstruct part of the case to better reach it.

Once you put it all back together again though, this isn't the most compact PC case you can pick up, measuring 550 x 420 x 286.4 mm. Mind you, if you're going for a bright yellow PC case, you're hardly going to want to then stuff it under a desk.

While you can display the case on its side, this orientation requires a sold separately mount. If you're feeling extra fancy, there's also a 3.9-inch LCD screen kit too. Should your heart be set on an all-singing, all-buzzing bumblebee build, the add-on costs could really pile up…but who am I to stop you from setting up a little rhythm game-inspired readout right there on your PC case.

👉Take a look at Amazon's PC case line-up this Prime Day👈

I've reviewed a lot of PC cases over the last 11 years and built in a lot more as well. There are very few of them that I look back on and genuinely miss. Iconic is the word I'm looking for. The most memorable chassis aren't always the best in terms of the build experience, but for what the build turns into at the end of the process. Phanteks' Evolv X2 is exactly that. It's a case that I constantly think back to. A system I wish I still had because, visually, it is unlike anything I've ever built in previously.

Right now, Newegg actually has it on offer still, even with Prime Day just about to finish, you can grab one for just $110 after rebate. That's an impressive $70 off its original launch price, and down from its regular running $160 mark on Amazon, too.

• We're curating all the best Prime Day PC gaming deals here

This is very counter-intuitive, by the way, what I'm about to do, but I want to talk about the negatives of this thing before the positives. It's a big part of the build experience. To be blunt, the cable management on this thing is a serious challenge.

Because you've got this wrapped glass effect going around, and that monolithic vertical chimney design, there's not a huge amount of space in the back to route your cables. There are tie-down points, in velcro straps included, and plenty of cut-outs (it's BTF compatible), but realistically, you need to remove the storage caddy in the bottom and use a fairly short and stumpy PSU to get the best out of it. I actually broke one of the velcro straps when I first reviewed the Evolv X2.

The cooling, too, although intelligently designed (Phanteks is leaning heavily into that chimney-style thermal convection strategy), is limiting. You can install your 360mm AIO in the roof, and your three 120mm intakes in the floor, and that's about it. What is impressive, though, is that the AIO cavity is entirely recessed into the roof. Install a standard AIO and a set of fans up there, and they sit cleanly flush against the top of the case, with plenty of ventilation too. It's limited, but incredibly effective.

The positives, though. Boy oh boy, are they a plenty. This thing is beautiful to look at. Phanteks has nailed the aesthetic. Tall proud. Sitting on a plinth, protected intake airflow, glass surrounds. The light bar runs along the back edge and through the roof. It is ludicrously clean. Better yet, you can grab one of their premium PCIe "vertical" bracket (spoiler alert it is $81, although it is PCIe 5.0 compatible). I say vertical, because you actually angle the thing, and pivot your GPU 45 degrees in there too. It just, at every level, is a case that I sincerely miss.

It, as I've already stated, is a bit of a pain in the ass to build in. But what you're left with when you're done is a system that is just stunning (and another build log here for you). It just stays with you, this thing. It performs well. It looks great on your desktop, and arguably, you can build some outstanding rigs in it. Particularly at such a super-low price point. I was so torn on whether to recommend this as a candidate for our best PC case list back when I first looked at it. Visually, it's perfection, but you've just gotta be prepared to fight it a bit to get there.

👉Take a look at Amazon's Entire PC case line-up this Prime Day👈

This week during Amazon's Prime Day sales, I've spotted plenty of cracking deals on plain black hardware. Just for a start, the Razer gaming mouse I use everyday is currently enjoying a tasty discount, and a similarly no-frills squeaker from Turtle Beach is going for even less. You can also scoop a comfortable set of Asus ROG cans at a cozy price point, and get the best high-end PC controller for less…even so, I'm about to McFlippin' lose it.

I am so bored of plain black hardware that looks like all of my other plain black hardware. As for white hardware, let's just say I've ruled out picking up anything that would so easily betray how dusty my home office gets. My point is, I'm on the hunt for a deal on something that looks decidedly different—and I think I may have found it now that the glass version of the Hyte X50 PC case is only $100.

• We're curating all the best Prime Day PC gaming deals here

The rounded, bubbly silhouette of this ATX mid-tower is a resuscitating breath of fresh air to a brain slowly turning to mush while gazing at otherwise samey looking hardware. Better yet, this deal applies across the colour wheel, meaning you can pick up a brand new PC case in either red, purple, pink, or green (Before you ask, yes, this deal also applies to the white and black colourways too).

Now, the X50's rounded corners aren't its only quirky design choice, as this case will require you to mount your PSU up top. I hope you've got power cables both long enough to reach and that would avoid being anchored at a weird angle. Our Jacob spent some quality time building within the confines of the pink version, and had some thoughts to share in his Hyte X50 PC case review on this example of its old school flair.

"I can see why Hyte has chosen the top-mounted PSU here, as the case would have to be made wider to make room for one in the rear chamber or risk cutting off height to the CPU cooler, of which mine only just fits already. Though I'm not a huge fan of the end result," he writes.

"It feels pretty retro, which isn't out of character for the case, but it also blocks a good part of the windowed side panel and feels a little out of place above the motherboard. Maybe if the lower edge was more rounded to give a floating appearance I'd be more into it?"

Add to this weirdness the fact the X50 doesn't feature dedicated cable management channels within its chassis, and parts of this build sound like they were a little annoying. Thankfully, Hyte includes plenty of velcro straps to batten down the hatches, and the case itself balances things out by offering pretty broad compatibility for cooling and components. That's just as well as Hyte have decided not to include any fans with this case, much less cutesy colour co-ordinated blowers.

That missed trick and the X50's other quirks aside, I have to hand it to Hyte for continuing to offer such head-turning cases (I'd also be remiss if I didn't at least mention the one of a kind skyscraper PC the company commissioned for Computex 2026). I must admit, a top-mounted PSU build does give me The Fear, but if it means I'm left looking at something other than a boring black box by the end of it, I'm willing to brave it.

👉Take a look at Amazon's entire PC case line-up this Prime Day👈

I know, I get it. I've waxed lyrical quite a lot recently about Phanteks' current line of cases. It's genuinely becoming mildly problematic from a tech journo standpoint. But I do think the company's on to a bit of a winning streak with its latest line-up of big metal boxes that we put very expensive memory into. The XT View Matrix is another golden boy in big P's arsenal, and for good bloody reason.

By definition, technically, this isn't really a new chassis. Phanteks launched the XT View back in 2024 to pretty broad acclaim. In fact, I wrote about it in Maximum PC magazine back in the day, and, to plagiarize myself, it was frustrating to write about because it was almost too good. Bit of an inside-line here, but tech journalism on the whole? Generally a lot easier to write a review when you've got things to complain about.

Back then, this thing rocked in at just $80 or so. It had broad compatibility with AIOs, supported E-ATX, and more impressively came with an extraordinary amount of shiny, shiny lights baked in it as well. You got two 120mm RGB reverse blade intake fans, one 120mm exhaust, and a full-size 16-inch ARGB light strip tucked away nicely down by the side of that glass window, chucking up some gorgeous internal illumination directly into your machine. Oh, and that's all controllable via a single button on the front I/O (or integrated into your mobo's RGB header of choice).

Good news is, that's all still there.

So, what's new? Massive dot-matrix configurable LED strip hidden behind a beautifully clean mesh panel situated along the external PSU cover (and breathe). Better yet, the price is still ridiculous. The XT costs £80 in the UK and $120 in the US (thanks, tariffs). That is utter madness for what you're getting here. This is the best budget PC case of the year, I have no doubt. Although that comes with one minor caveat.

Now, let me talk the positives before I get to that. The XT View Matrix? Beautiful. Paint job? Lush. Glass panels? Multiple. Glistening with a seamless edge. RGB fans? Check, check, check. And then you get to the matrix strip.

It's hidden behind a stunning piece of grey mesh canvas that absolutely looks the part. If you've seen a modern fabric gaming chair, same stuff basically. And I've never stroked a PC case more in my entire life. I know that sounds ridiculous. It's not exactly a sentence I thought I'd be writing after 11 years in this profession, but here we are. It's so soft.

But it's the panel behind it that's most controversial. Purely down to taste. Like it's 2001 all over again, and we're all pretending we're Dominic Toretto in that film with all the cars in it.

Now, I built in this thing, set it all up, got the beauty powered on, stuck the RGB lighting to what I liked, then called in arguably the second most well-experienced tech reviewer I know, my long-time fiancée. I went, "phwoar, look at that, that's bloody sick, ain't it?" She responded, and I quote: "I hate it, it looks like the pc case equivalent of a crushed velvet sofa". Thanks Dani.

She has a point, though, as much as I hate to admit it. Take a quick glance at this thing, configured how you like it, and there's this semblance of gauche about it that's sort of hard to ignore. You can, of course, configure it all up in Phantek's NexLinq software quite easily, and it'll showcase date, time, hardware temps, loads, etc., but it is such a bold addition to the overall aesthetic, you'll either love it or hate it, and honestly, I'm torn now.

Panel shenanigans aside, the build process is generally super easy. Chuck your motherboard in, then your power supply, get all that wired up first (trust me, you'll thank me when it comes to CPU power), then pop your cooler in and finally your graphics card, and you're good to go. There's plenty of space around back, and plenty of cable tie-off points too, with a comfortable number of mounting locations for those inevitable 2.5-inch SSDs we're all going to be dusting off in the coming months.

I'm also convinced someone at Phanteks made an error in the shipping manifests when they built these things, because the accessory box came with no less than 30 cable ties (that's not hyperbole, I can confirm, I counted them). Which makes a big difference in the build process, compared to the time I had with the Silverstone FLP02 I reviewed last month, and its two included ties.

So any other negatives then? Aside from the do-or-die display? Well, it really could use a GPU anti-sag bracket built in somehow or included somewhere, and my one and only major complaint is that, with the included fans, the cables are a bit "eugh", to say the least. You can daisy-chain them, but that does mean you've got random headers popping out near the 24-pin ATX motherboard connector and the rear I/O, which looks a bit awkward.

Otherwise, though, it's a stellar piece of work, and for the cash, you won't be disappointed. Good news doesn't stop there either. If you have the View but want the display, Phanteks sells it separately, and if you're like future Mrs Storey, and detest it with every fiber of your being, the stock model is still available too, without it.

Havn didn't do much wrong with the HS 420. It's easy to build into and looks great once the build's done. But it is absolutely huge and heavy. So, at Computex 2026, Havn had an answer for that.

It's called the HS 360 and it is very similar to the HS 420, only smaller. Specifically, it's 19.4% smaller and 29.5% lighter, the company says.

I'm told the panoramic glass, which wraps around the front to the side of the case, required a slight reduction in thickness and a tighter bend radius to match the newly shrunken chassis and cut down on weight.

"I think we could probably claim that it's the tightest bend on any glass panel," Havn's Steven Levitt tells me.

One new feature on the HS 360 is the inclusion of a magnetic glass divider, which sits above a graphics card using the vertical GPU mount. The idea is that cold air coming through the bottom of the case—the case uses a chimney layout with cool air coming up through the bottom—a lot of it was escaping right out the top along the front third of the case. By adding in something to block the air, counter-intuitively, I'm told temperatures are reduced by three degrees.

There are a couple of minor improvements to how fans are mounted in the case, too. People who have used the HS 420 will know what I'm on about, but the fans need to be installed from inside the case, which is a pain once components are installed. The HS 360 has brackets that let them be installed in the rear, and the lower three fans can also be lifted out from both sides for easier access.

The HS 360 also has a really smart solution for back-connect motherboards—those with all the connectors on the rear for a smarter appearance. The tray to the side of the motherboard tray, with the cutouts that a 24-pin motherboard cable would usually run through, flips around, which means a back-connect motherboard can fit here, and there aren't any unnecessary cutouts for a cleaner look. Smart.

All of these upgrades would be great on the larger HS 420, too. So I asked Levitt about that, and he told me they're working on it, but it's something for the future. Perhaps a V2, then.

I'm told the VGPU version of the HS 360 will be around $230. The non-VGPU one will be around $160. These are only tentative prices, but that would put this case a little above the larger HS 420 and BF 360.

If ever I needed the nudge to rethink my rig's cooling set-up, a heatwave in the mostly AC-less UK would do it. Earlier this month, I admit I had the thought, "Is that smell coming from my PC and, if so, why does it smell of bacon?" So when Phanteks rocks up with an unconventional-looking case that rethinks airflow, you can consider me intrigued.

I'm a little late to the party on Phanteks' EX series of modular PC cases; these were first unveiled during Computex earlier this month, though obviously I was too distracted by the Sanrio cases also on the showfloor. Thankfully, a deep-dive by heavyweight hardware creator Der8auer has informed me that there is another way to do modern case design beyond the ubiquitous fish tank look.

The Phanteks EX isn't just notable for its compartmentalised design—cordoning off the GPU into its own little apartment and generally looking like a sci-fi block of flats—but also for how it handles airflow. The most affordable model, the Phanteks EX5, costs $110 and requires you to source your own cooler, but every other model comes with a side-mounted cooling system included.

This design helps the AIO to direct fresh, non-recirculated air squarely (cuboid-ly?) at your hottest components, such as a toasty GPU. This directed airflow makes for greater thermal efficiency and also means you won't need to fill your case up with additional fans.

Phanteks EX6 Max is the most expensive model in the lineup. Costing $330, it takes cooling efficiency even further. Rather than detachable windows of tempered glass, the EX6 Max's compartments enjoy opaque aluminium instead. It also comes with a rubber gasket for your GPU, essentially sealing off the top of your graphics card's chambers from the bottom and minimising the risk of hot air recirculating.

This premium model also comes decked out with high-performance X30 fans, its own special AIO liquid cooler, and even a 10-inch LCD display right there in the case. A further flourish is that its RGB light strips can be configured to keep track of your GPU temps, illuminating more of the strip the hotter your graphics card gets.

Obviously, going from the more affordable Phanteks EX5 to the $330 EX6 Max is quite a jump, so there are a few tiers in between. So, the EX5 Plus includes a custom cooler, plus tubing management for $160, whereas the EX5 Max includes the cooler and the tubing management, while also throwing in a 6-inch LCD display for $230. According to TechPowerUp, you won't have to wait long to get your hands on this sci-fi tower block PC case; the EX5 case is expected to drop in August, while the EX6 cases should show up sometime in September.

This year's Computex may have seemed a bit stilted in the wake of the ongoing memory crisis, but one thing that didn't fail to deliver was unique case designs. And, surprisingly, I quite like one with a built-in essential oils diffuser.

Our Jacob managed to get a look at the Montech Ten Wood on the show floor, a PC with wooden detailing and a magnetic wooden block that sits just above the exhaust fans to waft its smell around your room. The point here is to add some sort of essential oils or otherwise smelly thing to it, and let the PC do the work.

Now, technically, any PC with its exhaust fans positioned upwards can do this, but the wooden block looks decent in this build and fits naturally in the crevice in the middle. There are three Ten Wood models: the M1, M2, and I3, with the first two supporting both Micro-ATX and Mini-ITX, and the last only supporting Mini-ITX.

Despite being called the "Wood" model, there is relatively little wood on this itty-bitty PC case. You get a small amount at the top and bottom of the front panel and back, plus the wooden diffuser directly in the middle. Personally, I think the wooden case looks pretty neat, and as an enjoyer of essential oils, incense, and all things smelly (positive), I think I'd actually use this case. That is, assuming the exhaust fans really are enough to waft the scent all around the room.

The basic Montech Ten is $70. The Ten Wood model will likely be a small increase on that, so it's still a relatively budget case. We don't yet have a release date, unfortunately. Admittedly, the diffuser is pretty small and fairly niche, but given its form factor and expected price point, it seems more like an extra than a selling point.

This isn't the only odd Montech case we saw at this year's show. It recently unveiled a shuttered PC case, and our Nick can't figure out if he's missing its brilliance or if it truly is pointless. As well as this, we saw a ginormous case from Be Quiet! with room for up to seven HDDs, and a Floatron case from darkFlash that looks like it was yoinked straight from an evil scientist's lair.

None of those got the response from our team that the Corsair Warthog did, though. This military-themed PC case comes with flight control-style buttons and a switch to toggle a light above the rear IO panel.

There are so many great, weird, and wacky cases to choose from. It's just a shame that much of the tech to actually put in them is only getting more expensive.

As is always the case (pun intended) with Computex, we've seen a whole pile of PC cases this year. We've seen flashy custom builds and interesting mass-produced ones, but it doesn't need to do anything super wild to catch the eye. Sometimes, it just needs to be big enough to fit absolutely everything in it. And that's where Be Quiet! comes in.

We got eyes in on the company's booth at Computex, and as well as showing off a TKL version of our favourite gaming keyboard, and a complimentary mouse pad, we got a look at the Pure Base 803 and the white Pure Base 803 LX.

This large PC case comes with support for up to 3 x 420 mm radiators and 2 x 140 mm rear fans. Be Quiet! says the Pure Base 803 is "designed for maximum performance, high hardware compatibility, and flexible storage options."

We expect some marketing speak around computer tech, but given the size of this case, I get where Be Quiet! is coming from. It has a modular front system, an interchangeable front I/O, and it comes with four Pure Wings 3 140 mm PWM fans.

Be Quiet! notes that the 803 comes with space for up to 7 HDDs, which is truly a phenomenal amount of storage. Assuming the average drive you grab is 1-2 TB (and that you can actually afford it), you can stuff upwards of 10 TB of storage in this machine. If you were to pick out 4-8 TB drives, you could almost squeeze 100 TB of storage in the chassis, not including any SSDs in your motherboard. That is arguably too much storage for the average gamer. Although HDD gaming isn't exactly the done thing anymore, I guess.

Anyway, the Pure Base 803 LX model has a glass front panel, comes with LX fans, as opposed to standard ones, and is also available in white (as well as black). The standard 803 has a non-transparent front panel, and seems to come in black as of right now.

Or should I say 'as of early next year', which is when Be Quiet! says it's aiming for the launch of the 803 cases. We don't yet have a price point on either model of Base 803, but Be Quiet!'s cases tend to sit somewhere between $100-300, depending on size and function. The Silent Base 802 costs around $150, and the Shadow Base 800 sits between $170 and $220.

Arguably, the hardest part of buying a big case like this next year will be the memory crisis, and its component-inflating effects, so here's hoping you have enough tech to shove into it by then.

This year's Computex has followed the usual theme of oddball excess, and while that's perhaps not totally appropriate for today's climate, it does allow vendors to showcase something rather unusual. In the case of Montech's new PC case, though, the design is so oddball that I genuinely blinked and shook my head when I saw it.

At first glance, the F738 Pro just looks like a stylish mid-tower case, with the bulk of the chassis standing above a large base that houses the power supply. So far, so good, but what looks like a fixed set of slats on the front panel turns out to be shutters that you can rotate.

"Airflow in suspension," says Montech's tagline, and the idea appears to be this: If you want to reduce the level of airflow in your case, perhaps to reduce noise or maybe just because you don't need it, you can turn a knob underneath the front panel to swing the slats across and block off most of the intake area.

Perhaps Montech thinks it's just giving you a style choice or something, but the tagline and demonstrations we saw at Computex all point to it being purely to control airflow. But here's the thing: you can already do this simply by setting up an appropriate fan profile in the motherboard BIOS.

That's what I do with my own main PC, which comprises a Fractal Design North XL, with every fan in the chassis and AIO replaced with various Noctua models. Yes, these are already quiet to begin with, but I have them all set on different profiles such that the rig is practically silent with little airflow when doing light tasks (such as writing this very article).

For gaming, when things heat up, the fans kick up a notch or two (though not all of them) to ensure that the graphics card is kept as cool as possible, and when I'm compiling Unreal Engine builds, the profiles are such that the CPU is now the centre of cooling attention. It was all fiddly to configure, I grant you, but now that it's all set, I never have to worry about it.

Montech's design will have you reaching for the front panel every time you jump between light desktop work and gaming, which just seems…well…pointless. I know that's harsh, but you're surely not going to leave the slats fully shut for gaming when your graphics card is crying out for all the air it can grab hold of.

I will confess now that I may well have totally misunderstood the whole point and purpose, and if I have, I apologise to Montech. But if I haven't, I can't see the F738 Pro topping any part of our best PC cases guide. Fortunately, Montech does have a decent array of affordable cases to choose from, so give them a look instead, yes?

I've been running our Computex 2026 liveblog throughout this year's show, and as a result, I've had a front row seat watching all of our reporting rolling in. It's been an excess-filled event full of exotic hardware releases, but out of all of them, I think the product I want the most is the new Corsair Warthog.

Not the ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 Edition 20, I hear you cry? Well, go on then. If you really insist. But I'll be honest, I've been in the market for a new PC case recently, and Corsair's latest effort has lots of design touches that make it stand out from the crowd.

Some of it's a bit OTT, I'll admit. And I don't like the Warthog in the Halo-inspired olive green colourway it's often shown in. But in black, with a nice dose of single colour RGB beaming out the side? Yeah, I think it's actually quite a handsome thing.

Those carry handles intrigue me, too. I'm not one to move my rig around too often, but I like the idea that when it does come time to move, I can grab it with ease. As design features go, there's something kinda... Batman, about those angles, don't you think? I dig it.

In fact, it's the utilitarian-with-a-sci-fi-flair design that's really got me going. And sure, it's got a silly "remove before build" flight tag that's definitely going straight into a drawer, never to be seen again. But otherwise, the chonky switches, the rugged nature of the thing, all tickle my inner nerd in ways that most case designs don't.

I'm a little less positive about how much of the internals are covered up by the small case window. I like looking through the side of my machine to see the hardware within, and something tells me this particular design would be more obstructive than I'd like in person. And at a mooted $200+ price point, it's not particularly cheap.

But I can't help but admire the little design touches, at least from the photos. Especially the fact that one of those front-mounted switches turns on a little light at the back, so you can see the rear I/O.

I know, it's such a small detail. But I like that it's been thought about. I like that Corsair has done something different, and I like that it's combined utility with angular design features that make a statement without venturing too far into the silly.

Again, though, that's just from the photos. I'd have to get one in front of me to give you the real skinny—and as I've been back in Blighty this year rather than on the show floor itself, I haven't had an opportunity to sneak one into my luggage.

Not that I would ever do such a thing, Corsair. Honest. But if I could pick one product this year that I'd really like to take home from the specs sheet and pictures alone, it'd be this one. It might not be to everyone's tastes, but screw it.

I'm the one who has to look at my PC every day, and in this case, I think I'd be rather pleased.

My hardware happy place is cool people making cool things. A case in point would be this custom build that leverages an already very nice touchscreen PC into a Taipei night market diorama scene.

The headline act is the light-up, 3D printed recreation of the Taipei 101 building, complete with an itty bitty Alex Honnold clinging to its side (the American rock climber free soloed the 1,667-foot skyscraper back in January—Netflix has an entire butt-clenching special on it). Exhibited at Hyte's Computex booth, it's the creation of hardware creator Zoë Baye.

You may remember that Baye and her husband, Brandon Ayala, are the brains behind custom PC business Zombie Tech Gaming (or should I say 'braiiins'?). I chatted to the wife-and-husband duo about their incredible cathedral case mods back in March.

Like many of the Zombie Tech Gaming builds I pined over back then, this Computex PC is based on the Hyte Y70 Touch PC case. An animated graphic on the touch screen even creates the illusion of elevators going up and down the miniature Taipei 101.

Teeny tiny, 3D printed signage attached to the case shouts out the wife-and-husband business. Hyte itself, and sister brand iBuyPower, also get a lit-up look-in. Around the base of the case are shrunk-down shop fronts shaded by 3D-printed and hand-painted Hokkien-style roofs. AC units and light box-style street signs dot the walls.

There's a true dollhouse miniaturist flourish to the whole thing. I'm especially keen on the food stand selling Taiwanese sausage with sticky rice, as well as the little wisps of foliage poking through the street's concrete.

If I were made of money, I would have already commissioned the talented hardware duo at Zombie Tech Gaming to craft a case creation to grace PC Gamer towers. Unfortunately, if I were left in charge of managing such a project, you know it would come out looking less like a tasteful recreation of our UK base of operations in Bath, and more like a shrine to Miku Hatsune. It's just as well they don't leave such things up to me…

Update June 4, 2026: Dave has been chatting with Gigabyte about the laptop panel Gigabyte has used in the prototype mATX system it had on display at Computex. It's a 165 Hz IPS panel, with a peak brightness of just 300 nits, but that release displays would be brighter. The unit on the stand was mostly there for market research with Gigabyte looking to gauge folks' reaction to the chassis. We said if anything it could probably do with at least being touchscreen.

The companies that attend Computex love to shove screens on things. Last year, we had tonnes of panels slapped on the side of coolers, cases, and more. This year is no different, but this time, it's a fairly sizable screen. Gigabyte is slapping almost an entire gaming monitor onto one of its cases.

The Gigabyte Aorus C510 Glass Infinity is a microATX case, complete with a 16-inch display on its side. It can support up to RTX 5090-size graphics cards and, outside of the whole 'screen on the side' thing, looks like a fairly standard PC case.

Gigabyte says this case has a "portable design for more immersive and adaptable system experiences", which I can only assume means you are encouraged to bring it along to play with at LAN parties.

The display can reportedly work independently, and plugs directly into the PSU, which means it won't just mimic your main monitor or need an external plug. That could make it a good media screen for lining up your next song or watching a video. It can also flip from portrait to landscape, depending on how you decide to use the case.

The case itself comes with a handful (pun intended) of handles, which should make it relatively easy to carry around. Still, to me, the whole thing seems very niche. Should you keep your PC on your desk, with its side panel facing you, and the display quality is decent enough, I could see some sort of use case (pun not intended this time).

That's assuming it doesn't reflect the lights of your room too hard to actually notice. I can understand wanting the panel for system analysis or showing off chat while streaming, but the size still feels a tad big for that.

However, for me, I feel like I'd never actually use an integrated monitor in my PC case. The price point will be the difference between 'niche but fun' and 'not worth it', but Gigabyte hasn't given us that just yet. We also don't know its release date, just a "coming soon" on its website.

We've seen a few fun cases this year so far. DarkFlash has shown off a version of its Floatron case that looks like it was ripped straight out of an evil scientist's lair, and Corsair has revealed the Warthog, which is a military-themed case with flight controls on it. Speaking of Corsair, it has also announced wooden front panels for its 5000D line of PC cases, including a ripple one I'm unsure I like.

But perhaps one of my favourite cases from this year's Computex is one from Amiiba, which has a Venom-like ferrofluid display in the top left. It's sensitive to both magnets and sound, and seems like it would be oddly fun to play with.

The memory crisis may have taken the joy out of some of this year's offerings (like a Galax next-gen RTX card with Swarovski crystals), but there are still some good finds out there.

The Warthog is an unexpectedly bold case design from Corsair. It's actually inspired by the Vengeance C70, a similarly military-styled case that has long since been retired. The Warthog, however, has all the latest gizmos.

Besides its very bold outer shell, which is available in black and olive, the Warthog also comes with a seriously good-looking front panel. It includes a power, reset, and light switch separated by metal bollards, and the reset switch is covered by a protective cover that needs to be flipped up before use.

It also comes with a 'Remove Before Build' tag, which doesn't actually have to be removed before building, but, hey, it completes the look.

That light switch on the front controls the light places above the rear IO. So when you're crawling beneath your desk, struggling to find a spare port, just press this button and life should be a little easier. Better than just prodding the cable at the motherboard in roughly the spot you think it is and hoping to make the connection. Not that I would do that.

The Warthog has built-in handles, which are probably good come moving day but mostly for aesthetic appeal.

The case itself, I'm told, is based loosely on the Frame 4000D. So the Warthog features a lot of similarities with it, such as the perforated motherboard tray and 3D-Y front panel, which is said to help with airflow.

The Warthog also features InfiniRail, room for one HDD, support for reverse connection motherboards, a built-in GPU anti-sag bracket, and three spots for 360 mm liquid coolers.

There are two RS200 200 mm fans up front and one RS120 in the rear, which should take good care of airflow out of the box. Though from earlier leaks it appears the case may be a little cheaper without fans included—perhaps between $220-$260.

Corsair didn't mention release dates to me but it should launch sometime in early August if early listings are to be believed.

Despite not owning one, I've become a bit of a fan of Corsair's Frame PC cases, and that's because its own ecosystem is very appealing. Adding an earthy note to that ecosystem are its 'Wood' and 'Elite Wood' front panel accessories, which launched at Computex 2026.

As of today, you can now pick up its Frame 5000D case with a wooden front panel. The 5000D is basically the 4000D but bigger, and, therefore, more customizable. It has a semi-modular design, which means parts like the front panel can be swapped out easily. Should you have a 5000D case and you didn't buy the wood model, you should be able to swap it out in seconds.

Both wood panels have holes in the front for airflow, and Corsair says it designed them to let "your PC more easily blend in with your office or gaming den’s décor".

Though I think the standard vertical wood panel is pretty nice, I'm still making up my mind on the ripple effect one. It has a big Corsair logo bang in the middle, then ripples spreading out from it, almost like the logo is a pebble crashing into a big pond. It's a fun bit of engineering, but I'm not too sure how much I'd like it on my desk specifically.

Corsair has shown plenty of interesting cases and case accessories at Computex before. Last year, we got a prototype for a modular DAC/amp you pop on the bottom, which I feel like I'd use almost every day.

Just yesterday, however, we got a glimpse of the Corsair Warthog, which is a military-themed PC with fighter jet controls that reminds me of Halo. The wood panel is relatively toned down by these standards, but I still think it's neat.

And it's only possible because of just how well designed Corsair's Frame line is. We really quite liked the Frame 4000D in our review last year, and the 4000D series got its own wood panels just this April. However, my favourites are probably the colour-changing cases Corsair announced a few months ago.

And Corsair isn't the only one with fun cases this Computex. Amiiba has just come in with a Venom-like case with magnet and sound-sensitive ferrofluid on the top of it. Then, DarkFlash showed off a version of its Floatron case that could be taken straight from an evil scientist's lair.

Though your likelihood of getting reasonably priced memory for it is long gone (thanks memory crisis), it's undeniable how many sweet cases there are to choose from now.

Thermaltake revealed the stacked Capo X dual system PC case, which enjoys the footprint of a micro tower chassis with some additional height on top, during this year's Computex. Why would anyone want to keep two systems inside the same PC case? The showfloor pitch centred on—you guessed it—AI applications, but there are other reasons besides.

Besides thrashing against local AI models, this double-decker setup will likely also appeal to streamers (it definitely helps if your streaming rig is either already really powerful, or doesn't have to give over resources to the game you're playing). Alternatively, if you have just enough room in your gamer den for two desks but only one PC tower, this could be a space-saving option for you and your player two.

The Capo X can house two independent Micro ATX systems, and you can gaze longingly upon the doubled up computer guts through the case's seamless, curved glass panel. Besides two small-ish motherboards, the Capo X also offers enough clearance for two 360mm radiators as well as up to 13 120mm fans.

That's just as well as while one gaming PC can get toasty on all its own, two systems in close proximity are going to need all the help with cooling they can get. If you happen to be a console gamer like me and keep all of your gaming gear in the same room, then on a hot summer's day you'll know exactly what I mean.

If you are set on sharing a set-up, this PC case mercifully includes double the IO ports. In addition to the set you can see at the front of the tower, there's also another I/O set situated on the very top.

This wasn't the only example of outside the box thinking Thermaltake showcased at Computex (or very much inside the box, as the case may be). The company also exhibited a PSU that splits in two…on purpose for easier installation. Neat!

As for the Capo X, OC3D.net claims the PC case will be available in the US later this month, and cost about $190. You and your player two will have to decide between either a standard black chassis, or the all-over white 'Snow' colourway.

I love a PC case with a bit of nonsense. Yeah, sure, gimme an extra screen or make it out of wood. Tiny and flavoured coloured like matcha? Yes please. That's why Amiiba and its new Ferra case appeals to me so much.

Its dinky case has a big, round circle on the top of the front panel with a pulsing black liquid—a ferrofluid— and it comes with a magnet to mess with it. Not only that, but a microphone built into the back of it means that the Venom-like blob can also react to sound.

Our Dave managed to get hands-on at the Computex 2026 show floor, getting it to react to a tiny magnet, and I'm just a little jealous. Given it's a micro build, it could handily sit on top of a desk, and I fear, the first day I had one, I'd find myself playing with it as much as the rig itself.

The case has two different models: the $119 non-ferrafluid version, and the $199 ferrafluid one that I like(according to Hardware Canucks). There's not much information out there on Amiiba, the company behind it, but we've been told it is aiming for a September release.

As well as the base model, you will be able to pick up swappable front plates for the Ferra, with them ranging from $50 to $150, depending on the type and complexity. We got to see a demonstration of the case fronts being swapped out, and it happens in mere moments.

The case itself looks pretty neat to my eyes, even ignoring the big liquidy elephant in the room, and reminds me of Fractal Design's Terra, being longer than it is wide and with some sweet wood accenting.

Given the removable faceplates, you can presumably go without any wood, too. I like the recent surge of both removable faceplates and microATX builds, and should the build quality be strong, Amiiba could have a neat-looking winner on its hands here.

That is, however, assuming you can afford the rest of the build. With the memory crisis ongoing, it has set a strange tone on some of the Computex offerings this year (here's looking at you, Biwin), but the case and keyboard announcements have been pretty decent thus far.

Cooler Master has a few new cases on the way, including one that may blow your socks off. There's the Silencio 600, which is built to minimise noise with high airflow, and then there's the HAF II 500, which comes with some of the biggest fans in the biz.

Let's start with the HAF. HAF stand for High Air Flow and this case lives up to the name with those two Mighty40 220 mm fans in the front. It also includes a 180 mm exhaust fan for good measure. These are all thick Liquid Crystal Polymer fans, said to be the thickest around, that can maintain high airflow at low speeds, which helps keep noise levels down.

The front of the HAF II 500 is designed to minimise any resistance those fans might face. There's also a scoop, as we've seen on cases like the Havn BF 360, which sits just above the lower fan to keep air flowing towards the graphics card and leaving some to cool off any components under the shroud, namely the PSU.

The case has lots of mounting points courtesy of the MasterRail system, which Cooler Master has offered for a little while now. It lets you move the top bracket to fit various size fans or radiators. There's no such rail in the front should you wish to remove the fans for something smaller. Cooler Master representative Brett Buren tells me you could theoretically run a metal bracket yourself, as there are rail mounting points provided.

"I feel like it would be a disservice to the case if you remove those, because you're not going to find these anywhere," Buren said.

The HAF II 500 is expected to launch in July this year, fetching a price of around $180 – $210.

Then there's the Silencio 600. This is more my speed, as it's designed to keep noise levels to a minimum. A part of that is the use of twin 180 mm fans in the front and one in the rear. Big fan, slow speed, less noise.

Though the star of the show is the front panel. Built out of a plastic fibre and reminiscent of air conditioning filtration, it's designed like it, too, using a similar principle to HVAC and AC systems to reduce noise.

"We kind of designed this to help trap and destroy the sound waves, so that they're not escaping out of your case," Buren says.

"There's these large slits in the front, which allow a lot of airflow to come through. And then on the side and on the bottom as well. So there's no airflow restriction on this case."

The front panel might not be for everyone but I quite like its practical styling. There's no estimated price for this one, however. Only a rough launch date around October this year.

There were a few other good-looking designs over at Cooler Master HQ, namely these limited edition gold finish cases and coolers. The golden mesh is one and the same with what's used on the DGX Spark, parts of which are built by Cooler Master.

Those gorgeous golden fans are actually a limited run of Cooler Master's upcoming fully-metal fans, pictured above. The standard version will be called the MasterFan A Series, and likely coming our way around June/July. Don't poke these.

Computex is once again upon us, and, as is the norm, we have already seen some pretty sweet cases this year. However, darkFlash and its Floatron F1 ATX case is among the most confusing to me, as I think it's sort of ugly but also sort of neat.

The Floatron F1 ATX that our Jacob got to see on the show floor has a largely grey body, with accents and highlights which are white, black, orange and red. It is loaded with buttons, although I'm not too sure how many of them are ornamental. The top right of the case comes with both a dial and a big orange cylinder that reminds me of an alarm light. It's the kind of thing I could imagine buzzing and whirring, with steam shooting out of the side, and that's a testament to its unusual design.

The Floatron F1 ATX case is pretty weird even when not customised. All the variants come with a "floating base", with a mini shelf at the bottom (so you can display your anime figurines or model cars). This means the bottom sort of looks like a pillar, followed by a chunk taken out of the PC, and then the rest sits 'floating' above it.

The shelf does come with ARGB light strips, though, so it could look pretty sweet in the right environment. You will likely want to situate it on your desk, as the buttons are at the very bottom of the tower. Unfortunately, it's hard to know how that shelf would look on a traditional gaming desk, as the image on the site appears to be AI-generated (based on the 'REFORLE OF GAMERS' written on the GPU)

The case allows you to mount your graphics cards both vertically and horizontally, and also offers support for up to 10 fans plus an up to 360 mm AIO. It can also fit a GPU up to 415 mm. We don't yet have a price point or release date, though the M-ATX version fetches around $120 at Newegg.

darkFlash has a few neat cases at this year's show. We saw some sweet F1 ATX and F1 M-ATX custom builds, as well as the suspiciously bin-shaped W1 case, and we even got our eyes on its Hello Kitty-themed DS950V PC case.

These are only a few of the interesting cases I've spotted among Computex attendees today alone. Corsair has just announced the Warthog, which is a military-themed PC case with flight control-like buttons that looks like it was ripped straight out of Halo.

And with the week only just starting, we can expect even more PC cases soon. The memory crisis might be in full swing, sucking out some of the joy of new PCs and handhelds, but PC cases will always be a little fun, even if the gear to go in them feels increasingly less so.

Vas ist das? Das ist Tryx Vas. Okay, that kind of worked, if you excuse my substitution of a W for a V. Yes, this is the Tryx Vas, an incredibly smart-looking chassis that our Jacob Ridley just sent us some enticing pictures of from the show floor of Computex 2026.

We don't have much more to go off than the pictures, unfortunately, as the little placard that usually gives the specifications says the following:

"VAS is a pure artistic craftsmanship project by Tryx + 12Square. Blending technology and art, it features an all-metal design of stainless steel and aluminium, shaped through precise bending and cutting techniques. A unique three-dimensional art piece dedicated to spaces that pursue ultimate aesthetic beauty."

My main recollection of Tryx's products is a fabric case seen at last year's Computex. But I reckon this new one outshines that.

The briefcase-alike PC case does look to be a Mini-ITX affair, judging by the size of the chassis compared to its I/O ports on the rear. In addition to ventilation slots, it has a giant intake fan on the side, directly on top of the motherboard, and it looks like the GPU sits behind the mobo itself, presumably with the PSU at the opposite end to the I/O.

Those are just my best guesses, though, because the insides are all blocked off by the steel. Which itself looks very plain, as it should for a build like this.

I must say, though, my brain can't quite make out whether it says 'smart briefcase' or 'industrial air conditioning unit', but hey, that could be a selling point in itself. If you squint, it even has an air of blower-style GPU to it... okay, maybe I'm reaching a little with that one.

If you're a Sanrio fan that's been looking to better rep your mascot of choice on your rig, you'll want to prick up your ears: on the showfloor at this year's Computex, PC component brand darkFlash unveiled four fresh new looks for its luxury DS950V PC case.

With the tagline of 'powered by cute, crafted for you,' the co-branded series of PC cases includes DS950V designs for PomPomPurin, Kuromi, Cinnamoroll, and Hello Kitty. Each mascot's name features in a colour-coordinated banner at the top of their fishtank-style case, while unique decals decorate the 270° glass panels as well as the white chassis.

The 6-inch IPS display on the front of the tower also enjoys characterful animations that display system temps and fan speeds, too. Now I have even less excuse to keep putting off catching up on Hello Kitty Island Adventure's City Town DLC.

darkFlash announced a similar Sanrio collaboration at last year's Computex, specifically daubing their MOTI Mini PC cases in a suite of limited-edition, characterful colorways. The DS950V case is a good deal chunkier.

Accompanying cards on the show floor list overall dimensions of 445 x 220 x 445 mm, making it only a whicker-width's smaller than the standard version of this PC case. Beyond that, none of these Sanrio editions is all that different from the white version of the DS950V PC case, with each tower offering support for ATX, Micro ATX, and ITX motherboards.

I'm chuffed that my favourite good boy Cinnamoroll clearly has the best design of the four—on account of his colour palette already complementing the white chassis. Still though, none of these is especially mind-blowing and arguably you could achieve a similar effect with your own set of Sanrio stickers.

With that in mind, it's perhaps telling darkFlash has not yet announced either pricing or release information for these cute cases. Character collabs for hardware like this tend to cost a premium (trust me). So, if you're desperate for, say, a little extra PomPomPurin on your PC, our Kara recommends the Sanrio DLC for Desktop Mate as one option that's likely to be much more affordable than any of darkFlash's PC cases.

After being shown off in prototype form at CES earlier this year, and even before then, MSI's flagship Maestro 900R chassis is just a few months away from release. So, er, get saving because when it does release in Q3 it's going to cost a hefty $699.

But it is a lot of case, and apart from a strangely exposed filter on the roof that slightly messes up the premium aesthetic, it's maybe a surprisingly impressive case from MSI. I think the thing that really stands out to me, aside from maybe the triple-sided panoramic glass frontage and the sheer size of the thing, is the completely removable motherboard tray.

To be honest, I found its placement a little odd when I first laid eyes on it at MSI's HQ this week, seeing it from the back with the PSU positioning exposed. Because the removable tray doubles as a kind of open test bench when you remove it from the case, the PSU is mounted directly behind the motherboard.

That looks strange because it's completely enclosed on all sides, with the power cable snaking out from inside the case. But it is side-mounted so most of the PSU's fan is exposed to the chassis' backpanel vents, so it is still getting some fresh air.

To be honest, when you've spent $699 on your case you're probably not just going to use the central tray as a test rig and toss the rest away, but it's still a mighty useful feature for a DIY PC builder, side-stepping the need to stick your new motherboard on its box, with the CPU, RAM, and PSU plugged in to see if it starts up. Now, you can mount your motherboard securely, along with your CPU, PSU, and RAM and make sure it's working before slotting the entire thing into your waiting case.

Though if you're combining it with the Coreliquid E15 360 AIO chip-chiller, that's not something you're going to be able to mount outside the case owing to its hoofing great 110° wraparound pump screen.

The Maestro 900R is a real showpiece chassis with that panoramic fishtank design, though some of the finer details would hold me back from dropping near $700 on the case myself. The fact that top cover, mirroring the design of the bottom edge, doesn't go across the full length of the case means that a large part of the mesh filter is fully on display at all times. And the cover itself feels a little plasticky, too.

I am very taken with that central, pull-out test bench though.

If that's too rich for your blood, too, the more affordable MPG Maestro Vixta might be more your speed. It's got an innovative floating base design, with a full 75 mm clearance intake space at the bottom of the case allowing for greater airflow coming into your machine.

It comes in wraparound tempered glass design, or a dedicated airflow version with dual 160 mm fans mounted in the front. There is also an optional 120 mm intake fan you mount above that space to pull in the cool air. Though, realistically, that space under the case is just going to get filled with discarded USB sticks, or pens, scraps of paper, old sandwiches, etc.

Or maybe that says more about my desk habits than anything else.

If you're the type of person to wonder how you get one of those cars with a custom anime paint job, you might like the Cooler Master MasterFrame 360 Panorama. It's all about putting your personality on display.

The MasterFrame 360 Panorama features three tempered glass panels. There's one on each side and a curved piece that hugs the front of the case. Behind this front panel sits a stage. It's only small, but it has a mirrored backdrop and two adjustable spotlights. The idea being you can put something here—figure of your favourite anime character, Lego, Gundam, whatever—and have it be the focal point of your entire PC build.

Beyond a model of a 1988 Lamborghini Countach and Feathers McGraw from Wallace & Gromit—I am a man of culture—I'm a bit short on figures to put on display. Though I do have one of Romona Flowers from the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels that fits near-perfectly and matches a framed poster behind my desk. The only downside is that the Ramona figure is a little short to take full advantage of the space.

There's no two ways about it: this case is huge. I measured it at 585 x 550 x 292 mm, which means it is not only quite tall but also quite wide. This does leave ample room for a large figure, up to around 32 cm, though ideally a touch smaller than that.

There are a few options for this compartment. There's the standard option I have for review with a mirror panel. This one costs $222. There's also a version that's similar except it treats the front compartment as its own, closing it off from the rest of the case. That's $200. Then there's the inevitable option with an LCD screen instead of a mirror. That one costs even more at $300.

Whatever you end up sticking on display will be well illuminated by the twin spotlights mounted to the top of the space. These are easily adjusted with a ball joint, allowing for 360-degree movement. They are also fully RGB, each with its own ARGB connection that can be either combined into a single source in your motherboard's lighting software or run independently of one another. There's a lack of lighting elsewhere on the case, though.

While all eyes are on the figure up front, the MasterFrame 360 does a good job keeping the functional parts of the PC out of sight. The side panels are lightly tinted, helping to cover up any ugly cables or connectors I might've left poking out from behind the rather slick cable management system used here. Let's take a look at that cable management, as it's quite unlike anything I've used in recent memory.

The actual PC sits on a tray hanging between the top and bottom of the case. Most cables are routed beneath the metal cover to the right, which is help in place with six rubber fittings and can be easily removed with a light pull. The majority of cables wind through this to the back through a removable SSD cage with space for 2x 2.5-inch drives. Though there is more to it than that.

Since the rear of the case is on full display through a tempered glass side panel, it needs to be in top shape. You can't just leave a big mess and try to cover it up by squeezing the panel back into place.

Or can you?

Cooler Master has included a couple of plates that are affixed atop of all the cables and the power supply, which almost entirely cuts out the need to strap down or zip-tie the cables whatsoever. So long as they're roughly kept under wraps, you just cover them up—job done. I did end up using zip-ties for a couple cables in the end, just to keep things under control, including the cable from the lower-mounted fans.

The largest of the two cable covers features a cutout for the PSU's fan, which can be even be adjusted to accommodate larger models. Though you needn't bother with it. Upon returning the tempered glass side panel, you'll realise as I did that the PSU is mostly cut off from fresh air either way. An odd decision.

There are no fans included with the case. There are, however, many places to mount them or an all-in-one liquid cooler. There's room for six 120 mm fans in the top of the case, and six more in the bottom. The case uses an adjustable rail system for the outer frame—hence the name—and the fan brackets can be moved to accommodate up to 2x 140/180/200 mm fans if required. Or you can top and tail as I've done here, with your choice of fans and cooler: I opted for 3x Corsair RS120 fans and a Corsair Nautilus 360 RS AIO.

It feels like I'm underutilising the MasterFrame's flexibility by only installing an AIO into it. A custom loop may well be possible without much, if any, modifications here.

The MasterFrame 360 Panorama feels tough, right down to its metal feet. Though that does make it quite heavy. It easily tops out my scales at home, but Cooler Master has it just under 15 kg on official product sheets. I can believe it, too, as it is not much fun to move around with parts installed. You really don't want to drop this thing on any side—too much glass.

It's an interesting idea for a case. The stage is certain to appeal to some more than others. It does make it easy to stan your favourite things without lifting a finger. Falling short of building a Hatsune Miku statue that doubles up as a gaming PC, you can stick a figure in the front of the MasterFrame 360 Panorama and feel you're still repping your interests. For that reason, the MasterFrame 360 Panorama definitely has a strong niche appeal.

As a generalist case, it's a little more complicated. Even beyond its enormous size and weight, it only offers expansion slots for a vertically-mounted GPU. The included PCIe 5.0 riser cable feels very robust, and it looks great, but you can't make use of any spare PCIe slots down the line for add-in cards. Perhaps a small concern for some, but power users with lots of NVMe drives on an expansion slot or anyone who still rocks a sound card will have to look elsewhere.

What the MasterFrame 360 Panorama does, it does very well. It's not a one-trick pony, and though it definitely favours looks over ease of use (you'll need to get a screwdriver out to wire in anything new), it has some practical considerations that go a long way. If you want to build a gaming PC that reflects your personality and interests without major modding, this feels like an easy shortcut.

Corsair's Frame line of PC cases is quite impressive. We were big fans of both the 4000D and 4500X last year, and Corsair has given even more reason to try the 4000 series out, with two new refreshes.

First is the Frame 4000X RS, which Corsair says "was created for DIY PC builders who want a great looking PC with RGB lighting and excellent airflow." It comes with a built-in RGB LED in the RGB Flow front panel, and it comes with a compact power supply shroud, which combines with the full-length tempered glass panel to show off even more of its internals.

The 4000X RS is a mid-tower case, and it comes with four RS120 fans (which would be $40 on their own) and room for a 405 mm GPU. If you want to pick one up yourself, it will cost you $140, and is available right now, in either white or black trim.

The other new case announced is the Frame 4000D Wood RS. As you might be able to guess from that name, it employed a wood front panel. Corsair says it's for "PC builders who need a roomy chassis with great airflow and want a natural aesthetic that elevates their home or office environment."

The wood itself is taken from "responsibly managed forests", and is one continuous piece of wood, so as to retain its wood-grain pattern. This case also comes with a full-length tempered glass side panel and a compact PSU shroud. You get a pair of RS120 fans as intake and one RS120 fan in the rear for exhaust in the box.

If you want the Frame 4000D Wood RS, it will cost you $130, and you can get it in Black with a Walnut front or White with an Oak front.

I really like what Corsair is doing with its Frame line. Last year, it showed off a modular prototype with a built-in DAC accessory (which is perfect for me), and it launched two shimmering colours for the cases back in February this year. Anything that makes the case feel more unique and allows it to fit into different gaming setups is a win in my book.

This is all helped by the fact that the 4000D is $105, which makes these new additions not much more expensive. You aren't paying custom case fees for a little bit more flair, making them viable options for wallet-savvy builders. That being said, my heart has already been won by the Nova and Galaxy colours.

This might be the most interesting case I've reviewed in the past 11 years. It's not particularly revolutionary by modern standards, nor is it the most cost-effective chassis on the market, but what it does do is tap into this deep-seated nostalgia that I know a lot of us have for PC gaming and the early internet of the 90s and noughties.

The Silverstone FLP02 is unabashedly riffing on that very ethos. It's a bold mix of modern case design hidden away inside a beige chassis aesthetic that's more at home two decades prior than today in our AI-filled, glass-panelled cuboid epoch, that's for sure.

The concept of sleeper builds has been around for a fair few years now. It's nothing new, but if you're on the hunt for a beige chassis like this from the golden era, you're typically looking at eBay and the likes for something second hand, and at a minimum that's going to set you back a good $100-200 at least and come complete with probably a full refurb and a crap load of modding needed to get it compatible with today's hardware, without all the mod-cons we've come to know and love.

What Silverstone has done, is basically industrialize that market desire. And, if I'm honest, it's a bloody smart play because this thing is dripping in sex appeal for me. Is that weird? Probably. I'm not saying it's the best PC case of all time, but it's arguably the coolest case I've had the pleasure of reviewing in the last decade, that's for sure.

There's no nonsense here, no panel modding or cutting required. This isn't just Silverstone pulling a budget item out of their back catalog and chucking it through the foundries again, no sir. There's more to the FLP02 than that. A quick glance on first unboxing reveals that.

Look inside, and you'll spot a remarkably spacious interior with a full PSU cover, support for E-ATX motherboards, full-sized graphics cards, vertical GPUs. There's an anti-sag bracket built in, a fan controller, multiple 2.5-inch SSD enclosures, 3.5-inch enclosures, and amazingly even 5.25-inch enclosures for if you want to crack out the old CD and floppy drives.

Jump around the back behind the motherboard tray, and you'll find even more enclosures, along with plenty of cable management passthroughs complete with rubber grommets, and it's all fairly modular too, with thumb screws and standard Phillips heads securing most of the good stuff in place.

The front is where things get really interesting, though. You won't miss the massive power panel slap right bang in the middle. It's sickeningly cool, with a number display for fan-speed control percentage, a flippy power switch, reset button, turbo mode for the fan controller, and even a key-lock to disable power with the accompanying tiny LED lights as well. It's completely glossy and fits in with the aesthetic beautifully, although I am worried I'll lose the two included keys, accidentally locking myself out of my own rig.

Above that you've got quick latch release covers for those 5.25-inch drive bays, then at the very top, in what's absolutely a killer 90s throwback, there's a flip-down I/O cover, secured with magnets, which reveals access to your USB 3.1 Type A and Type C ports, along with a 4-pole input as well. It's nuts. You're almost shocked when you see the little USB-C port there.

It's just remarkably well equipped for what it is. Cooling's pretty decent too, and there's support for up to a 360 mm AIO in the roof, and you get three fans included as standard, two 120 mm in the front, and one 120 mm in the rear.

Build quality is top-tier, but it is what you'd expect. The front panel is that beige plastic nicely color-matched, and you get steel panels everywhere else, including the entire internal frame, all nicely powder-coated.

There's removable dust filters and panels both in the front and the top for easy cleaning (although the front is glued into the plastic removable frame), and I can gladly report that after your build, you don't need to lean on the back of the rear panel to secure it.

As for the build process, it's actually fairly seamless all-in-all. I built out a classic sleeper build, of course, with Intel Core Ultra 9 processor, Asus ROG Maximus Z890 Hero motherboard, 32 GB of DDR5, and an admittedly rather small Radeon RX 7800 XT, and it did good all-in-all. I didn't hit any major snags that made me stop and think.

The only minor bug bears I had basically stemmed from both the GPU anti-sag bracket and the fan controller. Rather bizarrely, the controller's cabling was routed straight out from where it sits (attached to one of the 5.25-inch bays close to the 24-pin on your motherboard), and in past the rubber grommet for the 24-pin cable.

I think the internal fans would've been better suited if the cables were routed behind it and near the front of the case, as it did feel a bit too nostalgic (aka you just drape cables across the internal structure, because who cares you don't have a window). You can fix that, of course, just by unplugging and re-routing those included fans, and Silverstone does include one fan extension cable, allowing you to do the same with the rear fan, but I do suspect that's not really what it had in mind for that.

And then there's the GPU anti-sag bracket, which is a bit of an oddity in terms of its positioning, as it doesn't really reach shorter cards like the 7800 XT. You can remove it, it's only secured in place with thumb screws, but even the RX 7800 XT I had in here droops slightly, so having something baked into the back of the motherboard tray directly, kinda like what you find in the Phanteks XT V3, or even Lian Li's O11 Vision Compact, would've done it a world of good.

Cable management on the whole is a bit minimalistic too, certainly in the rear. It's not exactly mind-blowing. You get a few tie-off points, some included ties, but there's no channels or velcro straps or anything of the like, which would be fine if it weren't for the fact that this is a $200 plus case. Oh and cable managing around the top 360 mm radiator can be a bit tight too. I'd highly advise you route your cables from your CPU block and fans before you secure the radiator in the roof itself, just for an easier life, and leave that AIO install until last in your build order. It's not impossible to fit it, just a little awkward.

So done and dusted then? High score? Well very nearly, it'd be higher if Silverstone fixed those minor grievances I had, and dropped the price a smidge. What it really needs is a tempered glass edition on the development plan as well. Heck, give me a perspex version if you must, let's go whole hog on the case evolution history, and I can pretend I'm playing TBC again for the first time while staring at my beige PC humming away contentedly in the background on a heavy-ass CRT monitor with an 800x600 res.

The thing is, though, those grievances I have, aside from the price being perhaps a tad high, aren't actually deal breakers, really. Most can be fixed after the fact by the builder, and none of them impact the experience. The FLP02 is quite remarkable, bringing a bit of simpler times to the otherwise chaos-ridden experience we currently inhabit, and I don't think you're getting enough credit for that, Silverstone.

The Thermaltake View 380 WS ARGB looks a million bucks. Bearing the hallmarks of many a high-end case today, it includes a front panel made of tempered glass with wooden trim. How suave. It even includes three reverse fans for a more cohesive appearance. And yet, it's shockingly affordable.

This case costs $120/£90. A very tempting price considering there are four fans already installed in the chassis: three ARGB Lite Reverse Fan and one ARGB Lite Fan. Reverse fans are key for intake in a case like this, drawing in fresh air without showing their uglier rear-end. They look great here.

The View 380 WS supports motherboards from Mini-ITX up to ATX. It's relatively compact for its size, at 411 x 285 x 447 mm. That means it's only a little taller than the biggest motherboard it supports. Though it's easy to build into, as both side and front panels come away. It also features a dual-chamber design that helps keep its size down, with storage and power supply fitting neatly in the back of the case and away from eyeballs.

There's a surprising amount of room for everything in the rear chamber. The PSU is mounted on its side with a tray beneath for mounting up to two 2.5-inch SSDs and 3.5-inch HDD. You can also tuck away unruly cables behind this tray, which helps save on some cable management. But not all. Cable management is a bit of a sore spot for the View 380 WS. It lacks particularly defined channels for keeping cables tucked away, and what it does include for this end, zip-ties and Velcro straps, saw me fiddling for longer than other cases I've tested as of late.

The aforementioned fans took a while to get presentable. Each uses a pair of lengthy cables that can either terminate on your motherboard or daisy-chain to the next one. Daisy-chaining makes the most sense but it's not the tidiest execution. Similarly, all the screws you'll require for a PC build are lumped together into a single bag here, which may leave you guessing which ones go where if you're not familiar.

You could ditch cable management altogether—if the rear of the case was a complete shambles, you wouldn't be able to tell from the front. The rubber grommets to the right and top of the motherboard do a good job of keeping cables in check without alluding to the chaos behind, and while below the motherboard lacks any such grommets, the tray behind blocks out most of the mess for the handful of cables that run through here.

It doesn't take much effort to build a good-looking PC in the View 380 WS. That's a real compliment with a case at this price point.

Though there are signs of cost-cutting, and none more obvious than the non-replaceable expansion slot covers. This feels like a real miss. Not only are the expansion slot covers one-and-done but they're also hard to remove cleanly. I had to get a pair of pliers out to wiggle each one free, which slightly bent the thin metal struts that remain in place after the cover is gone.

Thermaltake View 380 WS ARGB

Noise testing with Toptes TS-501B sound level meter

Noise level

Sound floor (dB)

Idle (dB)

60% (dB)

100% (dB)

Thermaltake View 380 WS ARGB

43

45

49

60

015304560

Noise level Data

Product	Value
Thermaltake View 380 WS ARGB	43 Sound floor (dB), 45 Idle (dB), 49 60% (dB), 60 100% (dB)

There is a chance that you never have an issue with the covers. It's only if you install something into a slot, like a triple-slot graphics card (as I did here), or use another expansion slot on your motherboard, such as PCIe-attached storage, that you'll end up breaking another off. If you ever remove these components for good, you'll be left with an unsightly gap. Some may find this more bothersome than others, but even at this price, I'd much prefer expansion slot cover that simply slotted back into place once I'm done.

There are also no dust filters anywhere on this case, which may require more frequent cleaning.

You can fit up to 3x 120 mm fans (or a 360 mm radiator) into the top of the case. There's also room for the same in the bottom of the case. Though I'd advise against installing an all-in-one liquid cooler this way, as it may shorten its lifespan. Any air bubbles in the loop (and there are sure to be some) rise to the highest point; ideally the radiator, not the pump. Also, the motherboard sits pretty close to the top of the case, so a push/pull config for a top-mounted radiator is likely out of the question here.

The standard fan configuration is fairly competent, however. The included fans only run slowly, up to a maximum of 1000 rpm. They're often running slower still on a standard fan curve, at 600 rpm or less, which means noise levels are really rather low. I measured the sound floor at 43 dB on my noise meter. The PC reached 49 dB during an extended run of Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition. That shoots up to 60 dB with the fans running at 1000 rpm, which is quite loud for such slow-spinning fans, so I'd recommend keeping them tuned down in the BIOS.

The important thing is that temperatures didn't exceed the norm expected for them. Here are the results:

Thermaltake View 380 WS ARGB

Temperature (Celsius) delta over ambient (ΔT)

Baldur's Gate 3 | 1080p | UltraBaldur's Gate 3 | 4K | UltraAmbient temperature

GPU (ΔT)

CPU (ΔT)

Thermaltake View 380 WS ARGB

46

37

015304560

Baldur's Gate 3 | 1080p | Ultra Data

Product	Value
Thermaltake View 380 WS ARGB	46 GPU (ΔT), 37 CPU (ΔT)

GPU (ΔT)

CPU (ΔT)

Thermaltake View 380 WS ARGB

49

34

015304560

Baldur's Gate 3 | 4K | Ultra Data

Product	Value
Thermaltake View 380 WS ARGB	49 GPU (ΔT), 34 CPU (ΔT)

Thermaltake View 380 WS ARGB

19

05101520

Ambient °C

Ambient temperature Data

Product	Value
Thermaltake View 380 WS ARGB	19

Tested with PNY RTX 5070 Ti OC | Ryzen 7 9800X3D | Corsair Nautilus RS 360 | Corsair Vengeance DDR5-6000 | Corsair RM1200x | Asus ROG Strix B850-F Gaming WiFi

There's not much to the top of the case except for the front panel, which includes power/reset buttons, two USB 3.0 Type-A ports, USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port and an audio jack. Not a bad selection, by any means.

A few small issues aside, the View 380 WS is very impressive for the money. If you peel back the panels you'll notice a few signs of cost-cutting, but nothing majorly problematic. Bar those expansion slot covers, but I've banged on about those enough. Much like the actual wood stuck to the front of this inexpensive cuboid case, the View 380 WS is a convincing veneer. If I looked at this build in front of me without knowing a thing about the Thermaltake View 380 WS ARGB, I'd think it cost a whole lot more. That's pretty good going.

This here is the Lancool 217 chassis from Lian Li. Now, for the uninitiated, Lancool, for the longest time, was a subsidiary part of Lian Li. The concept behind it was to cater more towards budget-oriented PC builders and folk who preferred airflow over shiny glass and tempered aluminum hot boxes. Without necessarily capitulating on all of those wee PC building quality of life improvements that the big cuboid chassis often delivered.

In the modern era, that whole premise has now changed, and quite dramatically at that. Lancool is no longer its own isolated thing, but almost just a product line within Lian Li's chassis arsenal, with the brand's logo now strapped on everything from the box art to the front panel of this wood-lined boy.

Pricing, too, has equally shifted in a far tighter direction. The 217 here rocks up at $120, or £103 in the UK. Compare that to Lian Li's more premium solutions, such as the O11 Vision Compact for example, and you can find that thing for $125 or £110 in ol blighty. Not a lot more for a beautiful glass case, with arguably just as much airflow clout (in fact, it's arguably one of the best PC cases full stop).

That puts the Lancool 217 at a significant disadvantage. Not only does it have to contend with premium flagship offerings internally, but these price ranges have become increasingly contested over the last few years as well.

NZXT's H7 Flow RGB can be had for $90, complete with a full-tower design, epic airflow, and an included 360 mm RGB fan setup too. And that's not to mention the cases coming out of Phanteks, Corsair, and Fractal, too. The long and the short? The 217 has some seriously stiff competition.

The good news, then, is that the 217 comes with an absolutely insane amount of features baked in it as standard. It's hard to undersell that as well. No avant-garde metaphors or silly wordplays really do it justice.

There's support for E-ATX and EEB motherboards, back connections, multiple PSU mounting directions, vertical GPU support, integrated anti-sag brackets, an insane amount of included high airflow fans, plus the opportunity to strip down almost every panel off the thing, 3D-printing STL files, and twin power buttons too, one on top and one on the side for your convenience, just to name a few. It's nuts.

It's the aesthetic that will likely catch the most schtick, mind you. It has this love-it-or-hate-it, kinda vibe, the marmite of the PC building world, as it's this sort of hybrid mix of modern "wood" style, meets late 2010s case design.

You've got that classic steel mesh and overall frame, with wooden accents. You can either have the thing in black or white, with either a walnut or oak trim, respectively. It looks to be a veneer rather than a solid strip of wood (although I haven't taken the saw out to triple-check that just yet). It's almost trying to encapsulate that Scandinavian Fractal Design North kinda vibe, but it's a little less committed to it, and a little worse executed, which is a shame.

On the cooling front, however, the 217 is exemplary. As standard, it comes with five pre-installed non-RGB fans. You get the two 170 mm units in the front (delivering 3.34 mmH2O and 142.56 CFM per unit), two 120 mms in the floor (reverse blade models, driving air up into the GPU at 66.9 CFM), and a rear 140 mm as your exhaust. The ones found above the PSU shroud and the front of the chassis are pre-installed with these modular, rubber feet that operate in a similar manner to how old-school hard drive caddies did, where you position them, then slot them into place, which helps to mitigate unwanted vibrations. They do, however, suck in transport and can come loose in shipping if the case takes a knock or two.

General fan support is expansive as well, as you can include an additional three fans in the roof, along with a 360 mm rad (there's a removable radiator bracket up here), and if you have a shorter PSU (Lian Li's thinking you use one of its shorter Edge units for that), you can rotate that by 90 degrees in the bottom of the case to give yourself an easier time on the cable management, strap the included power passthrough cable to it, and install a third 120 mm fan to draw more air up into the GPU as well.

A quick glance behind the wee beastie, and cable management is an absolute treat too. You've got plenty of rubber grommets, an included fan controller, and velcro straps here, along with that aforementioned back connector support if you're into the "no-cable" look.

Building in the thing is an absolute doddle. If you just want a quick and easy setup, with no bs, you can just grab yourself one of the best air coolers out there that money can buy, slap your system in here, and you're done. Building our test rig in the 217 took me a grand total of 25 minutes, and by the time I was finished, all the cable management was tight, and the system was up and running without issue; cool, quiet, calm, and collected.

But, but, but, the issue doesn't lie with the features on display here. Lancool has had that down for well over a decade now. It's the price.

The reality is, a lot of the stuff on display here, the intuitive quality of life improvements, and build frills are great, but you're going to use them once, maybe twice per year at most (unless you have an absolute blinder with parts failing), and then forget about them, sadly. After that, what you're left with is a rather expensive chassis that performs well, but kinda doesn't look the part compared to other models available at this price point, even from within Lian Li's own lineup.

And look, that's the issue. The O11 Vision Compact I mentioned earlier supports more fans, more radiators, a healthy complement of 2.5 and 3.5-inch drives, and comes with just as many pc building creature comforts as the 217 does. All while looking better, for not a lot more money. Yes, admittedly, you do have to buy your own fans for that case, but even so, that's a serious problem the 217 has to overcome if it wants to make a dent in the market.

It's not a bad case by any means. In isolation, it's outstanding. If this is your first PC, building in the 217 couldn't make that experience any easier. It just needs that price lowering by $30 or so, then and only then would it be perfect.

Buying a cheaper PC case can be a good way to save some cash across a full PC build but you don't want to cut too many corners. A poorly-designed case can result in high temperatures and noise levels, and you'll be stuck staring at an ugly box all day. With the Corsair 3200D, you don't need to worry about much of that. Okay, it's a bit noisy, but it's otherwise excellent value.

Price maketh the case—or something like that. The Corsair 3200D is very competitive with existing options at $80/£70/€80/AU$120/CA$110. That's a little more expensive than the cheapest case we currently recommend, the Thermaltake S100 TG at $70, but whereas the S100 TG comes with a single fan; the 3200D comes with three. That's either three RS120 fans, as I have here, or for $10 more, three RS120 ARGB fans. Also, the Corsair looks and feels of a higher quality by comparison.

Removing the case from the box, I'm greeted by one good-looking front panel. It's grooved with the same 'Y' shape design often punched into panels and expansion slot covers on Corsair's latest cases—the more you look, the more you see it everywhere on the 3200D. Though it also has this neat design wherein the centre of the Y is flat to the dust filter underneath but extends outwards and upwards to the extremes of the panel. It sorta looks like a disgruntled factory worker punched the front of the case right as it came off the construction line, but I like it.

At the top of the front panel sits the I/O, within easy reach whether the case is sat under your desk or atop of it. This I/O includes just two USB ports: one Type-C (USB 3.2 Gen 2x2) and one Type-A (USB 2.0). Essentially, one really fast port (20 Gbps) and one very slow one (480 Mbps); great for external SSDs, less so anything a little older.

There are three dust filters included on the 3200D: one behind the front panel, one beneath the PSU, and one along the top. The top and front are magnetic and the lower one is held on with a few metal clips. I'll admit, at first glance, they looked to me like they'd block a considerable amount of airflow. However, I tested the airflow using my anemometer with the front filter on and off and only noticed a 0.3 m/s difference—2.1 m/s to 2.4 m/s. That's not bad, actually.

The three included fans—RS 120 or RS 120 ARGB—come preinstalled into the front of the case. That means there's no rear exhaust fan as standard. Either provide one yourself or go without. If you do choose to install any extra fans, there's room atop of the PSU shroud for two 120 mm fans. The left-side one is slightly angled by the case toward the graphics card; the right is slapped right atop and a little more starved for air by the PSU below.

There's room for up to three 120 mm fans in the top of the 3200D, or up to a 360 mm radiator. The maximum height supported for an air cooler is 165 mm, which led me to ditch a fan from the Noctua NH-D15 G2. Though I only like to use this cooler for case reviews because it is so comically large and more of a test; most would fit just fine. And the NH-D15 G2 did fit with one fewer fan.

If you're wondering whether you'll need to purchase extra fans for use in this case: I have a three pack of RS120 fans to hand, worth $45, and I've run a couple tests to find out. Here are the results:

Corsair 3200D fan layout testing

Ambient temperature: 24 °C

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition | 5x run | 4K | Ultra

CPU - Delta over ambient (ΔT)

GPU - Delta over ambient (ΔT)

Default config (standard fan curve)

38

45

Bottom + rear fans added (standard fan curve)

38

45

Default config (100% fan curve)

32

45

Bottom + rear fans added (100% fan curve)

30

45

015304560

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition | 5x run | 4K | Ultra Data

Product	Value
Default config (standard fan curve)	38 CPU - Delta over ambient (ΔT), 45 GPU - Delta over ambient (ΔT)
Bottom + rear fans added (standard fan curve)	38 CPU - Delta over ambient (ΔT), 45 GPU - Delta over ambient (ΔT)
Default config (100% fan curve)	32 CPU - Delta over ambient (ΔT), 45 GPU - Delta over ambient (ΔT)
Bottom + rear fans added (100% fan curve)	30 CPU - Delta over ambient (ΔT), 45 GPU - Delta over ambient (ΔT)

Odd, right? I had expected GPU temperatures to improve a little for an additional fan aimed squarely at it but it's been sat at a remarkable stable temperature through all my testing. I guess I just wasn't pushing it hard enough. Nevertheless, the one thing to take away from this is that you could get significantly lower temperatures for running the fans at a higher rpm. Though I wouldn't recommend doing that here. Not with these fans, anyways.

The only real downside to the cooling solution on the 3200D is noise. The RS120 fans are loud when they get up to speeds above 60–70%. Noticeably so. On occasion when booting a game, the fans would whirr up to extremely high speeds—and extremely high volume—for a moment before settling into a more comfortable rhythm. It's definitely one of the louder cases I've tested in recent years at these high speeds, at around 58 dB at max RPM (measured from next to the side panel). It's more like 48 dB while gaming on a standard fan curve.

There are some smaller things of note with the 3200D. Unlike some cases in this price bracket, the expansion slot covers are removable and replaceable. It also includes a cover for cables spilling out from behind the motherboard tray, which supports Back-connect. There's a GPU support arm, though I do think Corsair's design is a bit weaker than others, on account of a lack of flexibility (it often lands right in the centre of a card's fans). Generally, though, these are things I'm used to seeing on quality cases but that can (not always) be cut for more value-oriented cases.

To the rear, there are only a couple of Velcro straps included for cable management. If not sufficient, there are plenty of places to tie down cables with zip-ties included in the box. There's ample room under the PSU shroud for either standard or Shift power supplies (I went for the latter here), and two 2.5-inch drive bays above.

Compared to the Frame 4000D, the 3200D feels a lot sturdier, too. I believe Corsair used thicker materials on later versions of the Frame 4000D, so perhaps that no longer an issue, but it's good that the 3200D doesn't feel anywhere near as flimsy from the get-go.

There are some signs of cost-cutting on the 3200D. The din of the fans being the most abrasive of the lot, as it really is noticeable, and I'm not a huge fan of the magnetic dust filters. They tend to slide around a lot. Though it should be said that, this does feel like a very impressive case for the money. The fans make up more than half of the overall price of the chassis and Corsair is putting that leftover $35 to work here. A much improved case than what I'd have expected for similar money a decade ago (inflation notwithstanding)—it's easily one of the best on a budget.

Fans, coolers, power supplies, graphics cards, and, from today, a case are officially available in Noctua trim. Great news for Noctua fans; less so those that think PCs should be bright and bold rather than brown and beige. Thankfully, I'm into the Noctua look.

The Antec Flux Pro Noctua Edition is the Austrian cooling company's spin on an Antec staple. The Flux Pro was launched a year and a half ago and has been generally very well received; Noctua is changing a few key things with its version, though the fundamentals remain the same.

Here's what's new with the Flux Pro Noctua Edition:

• 4x NF-A14x25 G2 fans
• 2x NF-A12 G2x25 fans
• 1x NA-FH1 fan controller
• Noctua branding on the front/side/top
• Brown colourway
• Cute Noctua fan keyring

The whole package is priced at $400—not a cheap chassis, by any means. Though it does offer a saving compared to the total cost of purchasing each individual component separately: identical fans, controller and case, as sold separately today, would set you back $467.

The classic Antec Flux Pro includes six fans—Tranquil 140 and P12R reverse—in its $180 MSRP. If you just want the general look, including the same real walnut surround on the front panel, and without the much higher price tag, that's your best bet.

Though there are also ample reasons to upgrade. I've previously tested the NF-A12x25 G2 and come away impressed by the high volume of airflow it produces throughout the RPM range—even at lower speeds. That's important when you're running fans on a curve, as most will be, as you can get away with lower speeds where others may not produce as good results. Lower speeds, less noise. When you're bumping up to 140 mm fans, as offered here, those benefits are only improved upon by the slower speed of the larger fan.

Noctua's own testing suggests the NF-A14x25 G2 consistently produces higher airflow with lower noise than the Flux Pro's stock fans. That translates to lower temperatures, by a single degree Celsius to as much as four, when running at the same noise level to the stock fans. Noctua even goes as far to offer test results for acoustic directivity, this being the noise level as measured by a microphone facing the case at different angles. I'm going to include a screenshot of this below, simply because I've not had that provided to me before.

Let's get into my own experience here. Upon removing the case from its box and foam insert—the good type that doesn't explode into lots of tiny white specks that stick to everything—my first impressions are very positive. The accessories are stored in a neatly divided plastic container, the fans packed separately with their accessories, and the front I/O comes with protective inserts. There's even a small sample of walnut to mark its authenticity and a tiny Noctua fan keyring included.

The Flux Pro Noctua Edition looks better suited to the office of a 1960s advertising executive than a modern gamer's den. That suits me to a T—I'm not chain smoking in my suspenders all day but I appreciate the finish.

The walnut looks great. In part, I feel, due to there only being a small amount of it. It surrounds a mesh panel, featuring a lovely design pressed into the metal itself. You can see right through the front panel, suggesting to me that it would impede the airflow to the fans since installed behind it very little. That's true, as I've tested it. As measured with my anemometer, the front mesh reduces airflow by just 0.4 m/s—from 2.7 m/s to 2.3 m/s.

The fan layout recommended by Noctua includes three NF-A14x25 as intake, one in the rear as exhaust, and two NF-A12x25 above the PSU shroud as intake. So that's what I've gone for in my test build. I've opted for a trusty Ryzen 7 9800X3D here, onto which I've squished a Noctua NH-D15 G2. Though there's ample room above to install a radiator, up to 420 mm.

I recently reviewed the RTX 5080 Noctua Edition, however, I'd already sent it back by the time this came in. Boo, that would've been nice.

You can install a similar sized radiator in the front of the case, should you wish to, or even in place of the fans atop the PSU shroud. The PSU shroud is adjustable with plates included in the box. Though I'd be wary of mounting a radiator in this position, unless you're building a custom loop with some sort of reservoir or distro plate at a higher point in the build, as you're bound to get bubbles in the pump. That will very likely reduce the lifespan and cause it to run louder.

With my fans installed in the recommended locations, I set about running Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition for an extended five-run test. Then, because I'd like to know whether those bottom-mounted fans make much of a difference, I uninstalled both and ran the test again. Here are the results:

Antec Flux Pro Noctua Edition - fan testing

Metro Exodus EE | 5x benchmark loop | Ultra

Avg GPU (°C)

Avg CPU (°C)

2x NF-A12x25

61

49

No lower fans

64

48

020406080

Metro Exodus EE | 5x benchmark loop | Ultra Data

Product	Value
2x NF-A12x25	61 Avg GPU (°C), 49 Avg CPU (°C)
No lower fans	64 Avg GPU (°C), 48 Avg CPU (°C)

So, those two fans do make a big difference. For the graphics card, anyways, though that makes complete sense. A waft of fresh air direct to your GPU does go a long way, even if the CPU appears to be largely unaffected by the additional airflow. You can also check the temperatures on the fly using the small screen mounted into the side panel on the case. It looks pretty smart, too.

To the rear of the case, the panel pops off easily without tools (as do all panels on the Flux Pro) to reveal ample cable management options. A handful of Velcro straps for the main channel and more to the rear.

The PSU is mounted to the side, with a cable provided to reroute the external power connector back to the usual spot. This is usually pretty handy, as it means you can easily access the power connectors on the side of the power supply. Though, I'm using a Corsair Shift PSU, which already does that, so it's not compatible. Luckily, there's a spare panel included in the box to switch it to a normal set-up.

The added benefit of the Noctua Edition here being the NA-FH1 fan controller, magnetically attached the top left of the motherboard panel. That comes with Noctua's own extension cables already connected and lined up to exactly where you need them for the standard fan layout. That saves some time during the build.

Altogether, you're scoring an already very capable case in the Flux Pro with the added benefit of the best PC fans. That is a potent combination, but you'd expect as much for the price. There's no denying that a full build using Noctua fans has become a very expensive proposition these days, though no doubt a well-cooled and quiet one for the added investment.

Not everyone wants a black box desktop. Yes, a bit of RGB lighting certainly perks up the samey cuboid silhouette of a gaming rig, but what about those of us who want something with just a bit more personality? Something—dare I say it—a wee bit Extra?

How about a 3D printed cathedral kit that magnetically attaches to your PC case? Or perhaps you'd prefer something a little more Bloodborne-inspired? "We can do Bloodborne on the PC—not on PC, on the PC," Zoë Baye of Zombie Tech Gaming quips.

Based in the Pacific North West, the PC building business is a tiny two person team consisting of Zoë Baye and her husband Brandon Ayala. They're the team behind the aforementioned PC case cathedral kit that went viral on X last year.

Zoë explains the case mod began its unlife as a prebuild for a friend, saying, "They wanted something vampire and goth-y. Sounds like a cathedral—duh! I could absolutely do this. I was taking inspiration from TechLin's Afternoon Tea and Tech Tesseract's [underwater themed PC]. And they did a lot of pillars. And I'm like, 'Yeah, we could do pillars. We could do a cathedral.'"

The cathedral design itself isn't based on a specific building, instead being an amalgamation of vibes collected from 2025's Nosferatu, a Pinterest board of architectural features, and even a stained glass mirror in the couple's living room.

"Inspiration comes from everywhere," Zoë smiles.

After researching a number of other purchasable cathedral .stl files online, Brandon explains they began work on modelling their own original kit. He says, "We ended up using Cinema 4D to 3D model it, and from there, we took it to other programs to then be able to 3D print it—but there's so much prototyping."

Brandon currently handles a lot of the 3D modelling, though Zoë is also learning how to 3D model too. She describes the couple's current creative process as, "I bring him the sketches, and I'm like, 'Hey, do this, this, this.' And he's like, 'How about this?' And I'm like, 'No, how about this?' And then we bounce back and forth. Everything is a collaboration effort between us too."

Zoë, in turn, handles a lot of the PC building herself, and she shared the process of crafting the Vampire Cathedral PC last year, though the response surprised her.

"The comments were less, 'This is cool' and more, 'So, where can I order this?'" she said. "And then we got an influx of 200 emails of people being like, 'I already have a Hyte case. Can you make this as a kit separately?'"

That kit has since gone through at least seven different iterations, as Zoë and Brandon work to make it as well-balanced and well-fitting as possible. Currently, Zombie Tech Gaming only offers kits that are compatible with the Hyte Y70, Y60, and X50, though Zoë notes they are working to bring the kit to a wider range of PC cases.

"The requests for the NZXT, and the Lian Li, and the Thermaltake cases—100% we're bringing them, [but] they take forever to get the fitting just perfect," Zoë explains, "So, I'm really grateful that a lot of people have been really patient with us [...] To expand this, it's going to take us some more time, because we got to buy those cases. We got to measure them."

The current Hyte-focused cathedral kit remains a fairly complicated case mod, and takes two to three full days to 3D print. This means that Zombie Tech Gaming has had to upscale its operations to nine 3D printers in order to meet demand.

But before taking the business fulltime, Zoë and Brandon worked as graphic designers and marketers for a house building company. Zoë grew up helping her Dad build PC's as a kid, even assisting with his custom water-cooled build all the way back in 2010. She began crafting her own custom builds primarily as a hobby in her '20s, though circumstances soon necessitated Zombie Tech Gaming to arise.

"I have a chronic illness, so it makes it kind of hard for me to do a regular nine to five job with my condition, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome," she explains. "It just kind of happened gradually. I fell in love with building computers. I fell in love with customizing computers. I was getting sicker with my chronic illness. I was like, 'what if I just made this an at home little side gig for me, and Brandon would have, like, a blue collar job that he goes to?'"

However, when a job offer for Brandon fell through at the last possible moment following the couple moving cross-country, the pair decided to make a real go of the business in October 2025. Zoë describes this as their "make it or break it moment."

Zoë had already shared some of her earlier PC projects online, including this delectable 'Strawberry Milk' build, as well as a custom lavender 'Dream PC' for Brandon. Builds like this drew a lot of attention to Zombie Tech Gaming in its early days, though camera man Brandon also highlights, "I think what really hit it off was we were one of [very few businesses] that offer, like, full customization. On top of the cathedral kits, we were offering 3D modelling and printing."

Zoë adds, "That's how the Bloodborne [inspired case mods] came about—we had somebody directly hire us to do it. And I was like, 'Oh, absolutely, yes, you're a genius. This is the best idea ever. Thank you.'"

Zombie Tech Gaming has also built a Five Nights at Freddy's inspired PC for a client. This build used non-traditional PC building materials such as pinstriping and speed tape designed for race cars. "That was so fun," Zoë says, "I really like to give people the opportunity to get the PC of their dreams that, like, they wouldn't be able to buy stock."

Even though Zombie Tech Gaming has only begun to shamble forward, looking for brains, Zoë has been touched by all of the early support. She tells me that even though the cathedral kit is not the project they're "most emotionally attached to"—with a yet to be revealed project she describes as the pair's true "baby child"—she has "cried real tears over [the positive response] many a time."

"I'm just a chronically ill girl who is building stuff. I didn't expect to get so much support and so much love," she tells me. "Originally, we only anticipated our business to grow over the span of a year, kind of slowly. But then it was like, boom, here's a couple 100 orders [...] And we're working out of our garage—our very small, single car garage."

She later adds, "It was very surprising, and I'm thankful every day—I don't take it for granted."

Though a lot of work is put into customising PC cases, keyboards, and even GPUs, the humble side panel is surprisingly overlooked, given the real estate. I suppose this makes some sense, as glass is designed to be looked through, but a gorgeous stained glass-style makeover has convinced me we need more tempered glass customisation.

User Nososochek took to the PCBuild subreddit recently to show off a deer illustration that they've been creating for two entire months.

"This process took me six to eight hours a day for two months," they explain, "as it required a lot of effort, focus, and patience ... The slightest mistake, that wasn't corrected within the next five minutes, could lead to further serious problems with the correction."

The principle is that they were looking for a creative project, and stained glass being "aesthetically ornate" with "a lot of details", provided them a creative challenge.

"I wanted to choose a nature theme and considered many different animals, but a composition with a deer or a bird looked the best," they tell me. "That's why I chose such a magnificent and luxurious animal."

I'm also told the process requires special stained glass paints and the purchase of custom glass to replace the tinted glass traditionally used in their PC case. The outline of the custom design is a specific mould for stained glass, which is placed on top of the tempered glass.

Over time, Nososocheck manually coats each section, making sure it will actually stain the tempered glass, as opposed to just creating a coat over the top. They tell me the special acrylic used to stain glass hardens over time, which makes the process both time-consuming and delicate.

Think of the process as somewhere between the traditional stained glass method of individually fitting glass by soldering, and a paint-by-numbers project, in terms of difficulty and intricacy.

Nososocheck notes they've actually had this beautiful glass panel in their rig for over a year now, but it just never picked up any traction online until it was posted on Reddit.

"In fact, this work has been around for about a year, and I really wanted to share it with people," they tell me, "but other platforms ignored my posts about this deer. A few days ago, my husband suggested that I post it on Reddit, where there are a lot of people.

"I posted it with the idea that it would be great if at least 1,000 people noticed it, but I didn't expect such a high number of views, and I'm absolutely shocked! It's incredibly amazing that this happened."

You've just got to make sure not to drop that tempered glass on a hard, smooth surface. I couldn't bear to watch that lovely bit of art smash, even if all the little shards would look pretty scattered on the floor.

I bloody love the Phanteks XT V3. There’s just something about it that resonates with me. Small form factor cases are massively underrated. They really are. The very concept of them channels this essence of what technological advancement should be about. They’re arguably some of the best PC cases out there, on a purely philosophical basis, and I will die, on, that, hill.

Processing should shrink year-on-year (whether or not we’re reaching the limits of Moore’s law besides). You should be able to do more with less. More performance, less energy. More efficiency, less space. The idea that we need these massive goliath full-tower PCs, brimming with slots and cables and fans to deliver the performance we need, is just nonsensical, particularly when you could theoretically get to the moon these days with nothing more than the processing power of a Raspberry Pi.

It’s that ethos that the XT V3 facilitates wholeheartedly, and I 100% get behind.

This is a Micro-ATX case from Phanteks, based off the back of the company’s remarkably affordable budget XT line. It comes in at an incredibly low price point of just £60 in the UK or $66 in the US, cheaper if you go for the white variant. There’s also an M3 version, that’s remarkably similar, albeit includes a mesh front-panel with additional support for two 120 mm front intakes as well. Again, in both black and white.

It’s seriously clean, and although the materials on the non-glass elements aren’t the most premium, we can let it slide, particularly given what you’re getting for the price. Phanteks even threw in three 120 mm RGB reverse-blade fans in the floor too.

The V3 is remarkably compact all things said and done, coming in at just 460x235x370 mm, it fits quite snugly on top of any desk space you might have. The real beauty of that is that despite its humble sizing, it actually packs in a serious amount of kit.

Of course, you get the Micro-ATX and ITX mobo support as standard, but you can also fit seven 120 mm fans in here, a 360 mm AIO, full-fat power supplies up to 150 mm, and a chunky four-slot GPU if your heart so desires (in fact, I slammed a Zotac RTX 5080 in here with relative ease).

Storage support is fairly minimal admittedly. You can house two 2.5-inch drives on a single caddy, and one 3.5-inch HDD on another, all tucked away in the back of the motherboard tray, and that’s it.

Now I would typically throw that out as a non-factor at this point. A year ago, you could just grab those two caddies, chuck them in the trash, and move on, particularly given how affordable some of the best SSDs on the market were in the M.2 sector at the time. But as the AI takeover has well and truly trashed PC building, I’m starting to question whether these two older form factors and the SATA connection standard might actually be making an unfortunate comeback sooner than we think.

As for the build experience, Phanteks has done an impressive job here, too. Pull the roof panel off from the rear, and you’ll be greeted with the top of the chassis’ skeleton, with mounting locations for the power supply, 360 mm AIO, and two securing screws for the glass side panels. Remove those, and you can then unpop the two windows and store them safely as you build. That’s great for transport too. They ain’t going nowhere in shipping. That then gives you access to the front glass panel, again secured in position with another Philips head off to the side.

Once you’re around the back of the motherboard tray, there’s a few neat additions worth pointing out here too. There’s a PSU shroud cable cover to help tidy things up (I actually ended up wedging all the excess cables I needed in here, plus an NZXT fan controller), and those two hard-drive caddies I mentioned earlier.

The PSU installs sideways and then is secured from the roof of the frame, and there’s a pass-through power cable that you must plug in here as well, running to the rear of the case, just above your motherboard’s I/O. Just make sure you remember to flip the PSU switch here, before sealing the entire chassis up, otherwise you’ll be screaming at first boot.

You’ll also need to plug any modular cables you need into the PSU before securing it to the top of the case, as it’s incredibly awkward if you pre-install the unit first, then try to plug in the cables afterwards. My advice? Install everything else in the chassis first, barring the GPU. Then plug your cables into the motherboard, route your PCIe power or 12VHPWR where you need them to go, and pull them all through to the back into the PSU compartment, then into your PSU, then secure that up top. Bang, done. Otherwise, the rest of the build process is fairly clean. Phanteks has even included a GPU anti-sag bracket here as well, which is a nice feature, given the price.

Test system
CPU: Intel Core i9 14900K | RAM: 32 GB (2x16 GB) Kingston Fury DDR5 @ 6000 C34 | SSD: 2 TB Samsung 990 Pro M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD | GPU: Gigabyte GeForce RTX 5060 Ti Gaming OC 16G | Motherboard: MSI MPG Z790i Edge WiFi | CPU Cooler: NZXT Kraken Elite 240 RGB | PSU: 1000 W NZXT C1000 80+ Gold

As for negatives, there aren’t that many to report on, really. The plastic fascia does feel a little cheap, and the internal finish is a bit basic, but really, given the cost, it’s easy to square that one away. The only major downside I found, if you can call it that, was those PSU installation intricacies, and that’s it.

Airflow access equally is incredibly solid, and the XT V3 leans into passive convection quite nicely as well, even including three 120 mm RGB fans in the floor, to bolster that effort. That’s quite remarkable, as a set of these will usually set you back about $20, and they’re reverse-blade RGB units too, which, although not the most premium, will deliver plenty of airflow for your GPU and AIO.

It’s that convection that’s the real game change,r though. Install an AIO in the roof, and you’ll be exhausting hot air directly out of the case, pulling cool air in from the floor and the rear of the “very well ventilated” chassis. Despite not being an airflow-oriented case, the XT V3 absolutely nails it on this front.

The only other spin on that is that perhaps the case has too much ventilation. Particularly at the rear. Although those base intakes do feature a removable dust filter, there’s nothing on the rear of the case, just an abundance of rectangular perforations, so it’s likely you’ll need to blast this thing with an air blower a little more often than in other builds. But honestly, it’s such a minor point, particularly given that price, I’m happy to let it slide.

The fact that Micro-ATX is back and in such a big way is just awesome to see. The XT V3, similarly to NZXT’s H3 Flow, packs in so much value for such little outlay that there’s very little to dislike. You’ve got cooling, compatibility, and class, all wrapped up in a beautifully aesthetic design, with a price tag that gives you more than enough additional headroom to try and offset some of the other costing madness from the rest of our chaotic hobby space. Right now, it’s these kinds of blessings that are sorely needed, and the Phanteks XT V3 really is a light in the dark as a result.

This week, Corsair has announced that its Frame 4000D cases are getting two new colourways: Nova and Galaxy. They have colour-shift paint finishes "that change tone as light moves across the surface". Corsair says this creates "a refined and subtle look that shifts with viewing angle and ambient lighting"

The Nova case appears to be more blue-toned, shifting to purple under the light. Galaxy, on the other hand, appears dark, phasing from grey to green, to a dark pink. These two new colours are part of the 'Vault Series' and don't just come with flashy aesthetic changes.

The Corsair 4000D Vault Series has a compact PSU shroud that Corsair says leaves space for a 120 mm fan on the case floor. The case also has a full tempered-glass side panel (as opposed to the almost full panel of the 4000D) for showing off internals, and an upgraded front-panel IO. That upgraded IO now has three USB Type-C ports (with one being 20 Gbps and the other two being 5 Gbps).

Adding to the aesthetic, these new cases have an ARGB power button, which can be used to match the lighting in the build. There's even an "MX-Style green mechanical switch for a satisfying feel." That ARGB button can be swapped with a different mechanical switch if you don't like the feel, too, which feels like the right kind of 'doing too much.'

Each version of the Vault edition case is limited to just 1337 models and can be bought right now for $140. That means these new cases are just $15 more than the standard 4000D. Well, sort of. The standard 4000D model actually comes with three RS120 ARGB performance fans, and that will cost you $60 extra.

Still, considering what you get for the money, I actually think the Vault Series is rather reasonably priced. On top of the new colours and upgraded front IO, each case is numbered, which is a neat touch.

This is the second time in just a handful of months that a piece of gaming hardware has been limited to 1337 models. Based on L33t (which is fairly retro gaming slang), the Razer Boomslang is also limited to that many units, though it'll cost you $1,337 in return.

However, Razer isn't exactly a stranger to expensive versions of its older gear (here's looking at you, Huntsman Signature Edition). I'd have to see them in person to know for sure, but congrats, Corsair, I think I see the vision with this one. I see that vision so much that I'm a little tempted to cover it in dust and RGB lighting in my gamer den.

Fair to say we're established fans of NZXT's Flow line of PC cases, including the NZXT H3 Flow, the NZXT H9 Flow RGB+ and the NZXT H7 Flow. They're all four-star-plus PC cases. So, the addition of a new compact mini-ITX model, the NZXT H2 Flow, is very welcome indeed.

NZXT describes it as, "a mighty, compact vertical mini-ITX case designed to save space while showcasing top-tier components." And that seems about right.

It's a 20.7 L vertical-oriented mini-ITX case that supports GPUs up to 331 mm long, plus liquid coolers up to 280 mm. The design is very much in line with existing models in the Flow family. So that's crisp edges, glass panels and mesh inserts. Nice.

As you would expect, it's largely a tool-less design with pop-off panels for easy-access cleaning, upgrades, and maintenance. The cable management, meanwhile, includes built-in routing points and Velcro straps to help with not just slick looks but also optimised airflow.

Speaking of which, along with the aforementioned support for 280 mm liquid coolers, the case comes as standard with two pre-installed F120Q fans (3-pin DC) in the top of the case that NZXT says are quiet and efficient "right out of the box".

GPU support, of course, is ever the crunch point for small form factor rigs, and here NZXT provides a PCIE 5.0 riser cable for vertical GPU installation, again with support for cards up to 331 mm in length. For context, the Nvidia RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 Founders Edition boards are both 304 mm long.

Funnily enough, NZXT is offering a ready-built H2 Flow in the US, populated with a Gigabyte RTX 5080 graphics card, plus an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D or Intel Core Ultra 9 285K CPU, 32 GB of DDR5 memory, 2 TB M.2 storage, a Kraken Elite 240 mm liquid cooler and finally a Lian Li SP 850W Power Supply: All for $3,499.

The H2 Flow itself goes for $149.99 or £129.99. But the hefty price of that pre-built version is, of course, a reminder of what will be for many people the real barrier here, populating it with components, what with memory and SSD prices spiralling upward and graphics cards now ticking up, too.

All that said, this looks like a seriously slick little case, and the vertical configuration, in particular, means that H2 Flow's footprint is very compact. It promises to pretty much match full-ATX cases for performance while being both good enough looking and compact enough that you might actually want it on your desk. On second thought, scratch "might actually" and insert "will definitely". For me, anyway.

The humble power button on every desktop, laptop, and handheld gaming PC is nothing more than a device that joins two contacts and nothing more. But have you ever wondered if there was another way—a better way—to fire up your rig every day? What if you could boot your computer using something that is absolutely not meant to do that at all? Well, that's why one self-described tech tinker has done, and the result is surprisingly ingenious.

The person in question is Adam Lee, better known by his YouTube channel name of mryeester, and his latest endeavour sounds simple in principle but is actually quite hard to do: powering on a PC using its audio jack socket.

As I've already mentioned, PC power buttons aren't anything special: just a bit of metal that you press against two electrical contacts, creating a complete low-voltage circuit. The resulting current flow is detected by the motherboard, which then tells the power supply unit that it's time to get things going.

In theory, you can use any bit of metal to join those contacts, and if you look at a TRS/TRRS (tip-ring/ring-sleeve) connector, it's not hard to picture using this instead of a button. After all, it's just some piece of metal and plastic, so it should be easy, right? Well, it is, and Lee successfully boots up a PC this way within a few seconds of wiring up a connector to the appropriate header on the motherboard.

However, there is a small flaw in the design and one which Lee recognises immediately. Leaving the audio jack in the socket replicates the same function as holding down the power button for a few seconds, i.e. the PC powers off. That's because a power button only momentarily joins the contacts; the 'click' you hear is the mechanism releasing itself from the contacts.

Unfortunately, Lee doesn't create a solution to this problem in his video, and there's no indication as to whether the audio jack still retains its original functionality, though I suspect it probably does. As there is no mechanical movement in a TRS/TRRS socket, to break the contact, the only way to do this will be to have a little timing circuit that effectively drops the connection after a second or so.

But then you'd have the problem of how to power off the PC outside of Windows. Well, how about a separate stealth switch? If the audio jack is used to switch things on, how about something like a tube that you jam a peeled banana into, which a circuit then detects the current flow. Heck, if a squishy fruit can easily transmit an audio signal, it can surely be used to shut down a gaming rig.

For me, though, there's nothing like pressing a big metal button that's nicely damped and plush-feeling for getting my PC ready for a day of work and gaming, and I have to admit it's actually one of the main reasons why I use a Fractal Design North XL as my main chassis. It's a little bit of luxury that helps start my day in the right way, and we all need that in our lives, however small and simple it is.

As a card-carrying display fetishist, screens with everything—or should that be on everything—is an idea I can get behind. But this new GPU support bracket with its own screen, well, it's flirting with satire, surely.

Nevertheless, give it up for the Zalman ZM-VS3 DS GPU Holder (via Videocardz), available to suit both white and black PC case colourways. It is, as I said, a GPU support bracket with its own compact display.

Zalman isn't quoting any specs for the display, other than revealing that it's an LCD, which is a pity. But I'm going to guesstimate it's about 2.5 inches across and three-quarters of an inch high.

The listed specs do include 5V three-pin ARGB connectivity for controlling the ZM-VS3 DS's RGB lighting strip and USB 2.0 for hooking the display directly to a motherboard USB header, which is either kinda neat or suboptimal if you think absorbing an entire header for one tiny display limits your broader USB connectivity options.

Whatever, Zalman ZM-VS3 DS comes with software to drive the display, but it seems like the output is basically fixed and restricted to just showing CPU and GPU temps, plus the time.

The display is located on an adjustable hinge, allowing you to tweak the angle for better visibility, depending on how your PC case is situated. Speaking of adjustability, the bracket itself is fully configurable for width and height in order to support graphics cards of various sizes, including dual-slot and triple-slot boards.

If the non-configurable display output seems like a missed opportunity, it's likely down to the price, which is surprisingly low. Videocardz says the Zalman ZM-VS3 DS is on sale in South Korea for the equivalent of just $12.

Personally, I'd probably pair it with a Lian Li Vector V200 case, which has its own 8.8-inch screen. Maybe I'd also throw in Lian Li's Hydroshift II LCD Curve, an AIO liquid CPU cooler with a curved display on a motorised mount.

Wait, maybe that should be the Borg-like Thermaltake Minecube 360 Ultra ARGB Sync, an AIO cooler with four screens. Gah. One large curved and motorised screen versus four plain-ole square screens. Quite the conundrum.

Anywho, in an age where smelting your own precious metal ore is probably more cost-effective than securing even a single PC memory chip, it's comforting to know that you can add an extra screen to your PC for a mere 12 bucks. Ultimately, the question is why, the question is why not?

I've waited for over a decade for a true successor to the Corsair Carbide Air 540. With plenty of room for storage, fans, and a disk drive in its dual-chamber design, the Air 540 was a great pick for my own PC back in 2014. Though I've since moved on, and that case has been stuck in storage for years. Now, finally—finally—we have a true successor in the Corsair Air 5400.

The Air 5400 isn't just a rerun of old ideas. It's still a stocky cuboid, but where the Air 540 championed a dual-chamber design that has become the norm for PC cases, the Air 5400 offers a triple-chamber design. Think of it like three distinct zones: there's the main one, for showing off your build; the rear one, with plenty of room for cable management; and a third one, for mounting an all-in-one liquid cooler's radiator inside.

The idea behind the third chamber is pretty simple. By mounting the radiator away from other components, and with ample airflow, hot air generated by the CPU can be efficiently expelled from the case and not warm anything around it. It also removes the need for the radiator to block precious fan mounting locations.

It's a slick solution. The radiator is mounted toward the front of the case, behind a removable grill. There's a transparent plastic duct sitting just behind the radiator, which vents out of the case via a large opening from the top to the bottom of the case—the novelty of this has not yet worn on for me and I still frequently stick my hand in it.

Cooler installation is a bit more involved than normal, requiring feeding the liquid cooler pump and cooling through to the main chamber while securing the radiator into place. A removable mounting plate helps a bunch here, as I'm able to mount the fans and radiator to it, then fit the rest to the case with only two screws.

The Air 5400 is a relatively tool-free design. Besides the odd screw used in the initial installation, access to the inside of this PC is relatively unfettered. The panels can be pulled away with your bare hands, and the windowed side panel swings open on a hinge. And I'm yet to mention one of my favourite details: the smaller glass panel making up the front-left of the case is also on a hinge and swings open, exposing the entire main chamber for easy tinkering. The rear panel, too, is hinged—so long as you leave reasonable space around the Air 5400 for the so-called French doors, it's extremely easy to work on in a pinch.

Corsair calls these French doors and I'm surprisingly okay with this level of pomposity here.

The three chambers are separated from each other by a novel brush design—at least I've not used a case with anything remotely similar. The nylon bristles in this case work something like a letterbox here in the UK, blocking out drafts and keeping dust and light from reaching inside. If this isn't a thing in your country, I invoke you to search 'UK letterbox bristles' for a real thrill. It's a clever solution for a PC case, covering the gaps left by cables better than most grommets. I'm surprised it's not used more often.

Between panoramic windowed panels and easy cable management, it's easy to build a great-looking gaming PC in the Air 5400. A big part of that appeal is the straightforward layout. It's a chimney design, intended for cool air to enter via the bottom of the case and hot air to be exhausted out from the top, via the 3x 120 mm fans mounted at both locations.

Furthermore, in a slightly unusual attempt to aid airflow, the Air 5400 includes two ducts, as Corsair calls them, surrounding each set of fans. The idea behind these ducts is that, by containing the airflow generated by the fans, it's better directed at the graphics card and motherboard, rather than wasted out the sides. The ducts look surprisingly classy; each features a repeating Corsair 'Y' motif that disappears as they taper.

It's a clean look. Moreover, I've no complaints regarding thermals.

I use various combinations of chips and coolers for testing cases—what I have to hand at the time, mostly. In this case, I've installed the Corsair Nautilus 360 RS. Despite using one of the more power-hungry Ryzen processors in this machine, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D, it ran at one of the lowest temperatures I've recorded of any build in the past year. A maximum CPU temperature of just 72 °C during our benchmarking suite, which includes multiple taxing runs of Cinebench 2024. The RTX 5090 FE I've used here hit just 73 °C—around 5 °C cooler than our open test bench in similar tests.

I've added extra fans to complete this build that are not included with the case as standard, and anyone purchasing this case will need at least three more fans. There are nine 120 mm fans inside this machine: six in the main chamber and three on the radiator. Only three of those are included with the case. The other six are LX120 RGB fans that I've added separately.

For those three included fans, there are two options available: LX-R RGB iCUE Link fans or RS-R ARGB fans. My preference being the non-iCUE models, as these are the cheaper of the two options, don't require iCUE, and can be picked up separately for less. Though I'm glad to see reversed fans as standard in a case that absolutely requires them to look its best. For an idea of what I mean, the Hyte X50 looks worse than it should for a lack of reverse fans.

• Air 5400 w/ LX-R RGB: $310/£285
• Air 5400 w/ RS-R ARGB: $230/£240

Corsair has included some upgrades behind-the-scenes, too. The rear chamber is hidden from sight via a hinged panel, for a start. Corsair is using what it calls RapidRoute 2.0 in the Air 5400. What it means by this is the motherboard tray has a sort-of pegboard design; it's a checkboard of holes for installing zip-ties or moving around the ratcheted straps included with the case. These come preinstalled on a cable tidy tray that juts out at an angle from the case and follows the angle of the duct for the radiator.

You're never far from a spot to tie a cable down in the Air 5400. That said, there's little need for much cable management at all. Everything can be secured through the provided straps on the cable tray, with ample room beneath the PSU that's practically surplus to requirement in a normal PC build.

The power supply is mounted high up in the case, which shortens the cable run to the CPU connectors but requires a bit of a stretch for the 12V-2x6 cable. Nothing to worry about, nor do I feel I'm putting too much pressure on the graphics card's power connection, but I did have to tinker around with the cable placement and straps to get it sitting in the right position with plenty of slack.

As I mentioned, there's loads of room below the PSU. As standard, it's partially filled up with a storage tray, but it can be removed with two thumbscrews if surplus to requirement. This tray supports two 2.5-inch SSDs, a single 3.5-inch HDD, and/or an iCUE System Hub. I didn't require the latter as I was using Corsair's new PSU, the HX1200i Shift, which includes an iCUE System Hub itself.

Side note: if you are interested in using iCUE for your system control, the HX1200i Shift saves on some of the cable mess but is mighty expensive.

There are a couple of things I don't like about the Air 5400. It weighs a lot, at 16.7 kg, and the front panel only offers Type-C ports: 1x USB 3.2 Gen 2 and 2x USB 3.2 Gen 1. While I do appreciate Corsair driving universal adoption of the Type-C connector, I do not own strictly Type-C devices. I still have a lot of Type-A devices that I used to plug into the front panel, such as thumb drives. Alas, someday soon I'll ditch Type-A for good. That will be a good day.

I appreciate the inclusion of a built-in GPU bracket, too, though the limited adjustments it offers mean it doesn't always play nicely with some models of graphics card. It sorta just stabs directly into the fan on an RTX 50-series Founders Edition.

But for mostly minor complaints, I can find much more to compliment on the Air 5400. It's spacious, stocky and has included within it some genuine innovations. The separate chamber for a radiator is excellent for managing thermals and maintaining a clean aesthetic. Moreover, small-scale innovations like RapidRoute 2.0, which saves time during the build process, or the nylon brushes to separate the chambers, are all very welcome additions I would like to see filter into more cases.

This is Corsair's case design at its best, bringing together a lot of ideas into something quite extraordinary.

Vegans and ovophobes, look away now because crafty PC case makers InWin's latest full tower creation looks not unlike a futuristic glass egg. Unveiled during CES 2026, it's the Taiwanese company's 12th 'Signature Chassis' and it's called Aeon. However, its angular glass panelling is hardly the most dramatic thing about it.

Don't get me wrong, the mosaic mirrored panels are very snazzy but perhaps a little too attention-grabbing for any room I could realistically picture it in. With a base measuring 840 mm by 691 mm plus a height of 912 mm, it's not just these odd angles that present a practical placement challenge either. Buckle up, because the InWin Aeon PC case possesses one of the most extra opening mechanisms I've yet seen.

First, you need to trigger the opening mechanism by swiping an RFID card across the PC case's base. Then, the case's back opens and is gently lowered to lie flat via a hydraulic mechanism. This is meant to afford easy hardware installation but it's a whole lot of fanfare just to open your PC case—Not to mention additional potential points of failure. InWin isn't calling this a 'Signature Chassis' for no reason.

It's currently unclear whether the Aeon will ever be available for general purchase. InWin has previously released a number of its quirky cases as signature products in limited numbers, though I've no doubt if the Aeon goes this route, you'll have to crack open a nest egg or two to buy it.

The Aeon case enjoys broad motherboard compatibility, offering a shiny spot to E-ATX, ATX, Micro-ATX, and Mini-ITX boards. There's also eight PCIe expansion slots, plus room for a 360 mm long GPU and CPUs with heatsinks measuring up to 140 mm. You've got a choice between air or water cooling too, with space for multiple fans up to 140 mm or a 360/420 mm radiator. In other words, this futuristic egg is certainly roomy.

It was hardly the only PC case InWin showed-off at this year's CES, though the company's other offerings were decidedly more conventional desktop housing (if that's more your speed, we have plenty of our own suggestions when it comes to the best PC cases). But between origami-inspired designs and disconcertingly organic looking, 3D-printed PC cages, InWin is no stranger to head-turning trade show offerings (this magical coffee cup design is still a favourite of mine).

As for CES 2026 more generally, we've seen a classy Mini-ITX PC case from Thermaltake that is also a collaboration with French artist Koralie, as well as a mid-tower offering from CyberPower PC which enjoys distinct knob appeal. Beyond desktop housing with an appealing outer appearance, Asus has decided to look inward; its new ROG G1000 gaming PC features a 'world's first' fan-based holographic system built into the case. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm craving an eggy bap.

Head-turning cases at CES are hardly unusual, yet this year has already seen a couple of belters. CyberPowerPC has helped kick off this year's show with a bang, flaunting a majestic mid-tower case that could fit into either an office space or a gamer den with ease.

The case in question is the MA-01, which CyberPowerPC fairly calls "elegant". It's a clean fishtank-style case, with a tempered glass panel stretching from the side to the front. On top sits a woven steel mesh ventilation, and on the bottom sits a selection of ports, plus the case's standout features: knobs.

These knobs control LEDs hidden in the interior of the case. The top knob adjusts colour, while the second adjusts brightness, and the third adjusts mode. Presumably, this means you could have colours pulse, alternate rhythmically, or become static. CyberPowerPC says these knobs work without any software and give you access to the "full 16.7 million colour spectrum." Those knobs would mean little if the case didn't also look good, but luckily, it's sleek with plenty of personality, too, thanks to that dramatic lighting.

It's the type of PC you'd want to pop on a desk, not only because it looks gorgeous, but also because the on button appears to be just above those knobs at the bottom of the case. I'd want it on a desk either way, because I don't think I could stop myself from messing around with the colours whenever I'm procrastinating.

It's a mid-tower case with support for ATX and micro-ATX motherboards. The front has two USB 3.0 ports, one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port, and a 3.5 mm jack. It supports a GPU that measures up to 420 mm, a CPU cooler up to 185 mm, and a PSU up to 200 mm.

The MA-01 will be available in three different finishes: The grey 'Satin Metallic Dark Silver', black 'Matte Satin Dark Steel Grey', and the cream 'Matte Satin Off-White'. The case will also be available in a 'Chrome Steel' version.

A welcome surprise from gear announced at CES 2026 so far, this case not only has a solid release window but also an exact price. Lucky us. If you want to pick one up for yourself, it will cost you $150 for the standard versions and $250 for the Chrome Steel model, when both launch during Q2, 2026.

I think it would make for a luxurious and clean build at a reasonable price. It's just a shame the rest of the build will likely cost you a few arms, a leg, and maybe a bit of your torso too.

Mini PCs and cute aesthetics just go hand in hand. There are two reasons you might build a small form factor machine: you want a compact machine that doesn't dominate your entire desktop, or you're building something so small because you simply think it looks good. And for me, Thermaltake's latest PC Case looks so good, I want to finally make that build.

Announced as part of its presence at CES 2026, Thermaltake has shown off its TR100 Koralie edition. The standard TR100 is a dual-chamber, Mini-ITX case, which is to say it's a compact bit of tech. At $150, it's also a reasonably priced start to a small build. Even if the rest of your build will be torturously expensive.

The Koralie edition offers much the same, except at a currently unknown price point. Each case is numbered and signed, and the presence of a store page implies that some will be able to purchase it, but we don't have much more on it just yet.

The case itself is blue with a striking symmetrical design, which Thermaltake says is inspired by "Mediterranean, Asian, Art Deco, and Indigenous aesthetics". It's a bit of a beauty, and it still comes with a spot on the top for a 3.9-inch LCD screen to show off your waifu, your lunch, or whatever else you'd use a PC case screen for.

Koralie herself is an artist who has been exploring the link between nature and human-made beauty for decades, painting the walls of her town in Petite Camargue, France, with graffiti since 1999. On the Thermaltake site, it claims that the Koralie edition of its TR100 blends "technology with art, transforming a functional component into a striking piece".

Whether or not these lofty goals have been met will naturally be up to the viewer/buyer, but it is certainly "a work of art that people want to display in their homes", as claimed by the store page.

Naturally, the big questions here are how much it will cost and when it will arrive. Unfortunately, we have the answer to neither of these, so we'll just have to admire from afar until Thermaltake lets us know. The goal of cases like this being unveiled at CES 2026 is naturally to catch eyes, and this has certainly caught mine.

For a good while now, I've been using Fractal Design's North XL as the case for my main PC. It's very big, with bags of room for cooling and graphics cards, plus I really like the wooden slats on the front and the plush brass power button. However, over time, I've come to find that it's actually not very flexible nor particularly good at cooling power-hungry GPUs, like the RTX 5090.

So I'm genuinely considering swapping the chassis for a Lian Li Lancool 217, now down to $115 at Newegg. On paper, it seems almost identical to the North XL: it's the same width and height, and is only 22 mm (0.9 inches) shorter.

• We're curating all the best Cyber Monday PC gaming deals over here

The North XL can fully support a 360 mm radiator at the top and a 420 mm one at the front, whereas the Lancool 217 is mostly designed to just host a 360 mm one at the top. That might sound disappointing, but Lian Li has made up for this when it comes to fans.

It comes with two 170 mm at the front, two 120 mm at the bottom, and a single 140 mm at the rear. The North XL comes with four 140 mm fans (three front, one rear), which is very good, but not quite as good as the Lancool 217. Overall, it offers more flexibility for adding fans than you get with the Fractal Design case.

Both look just as good as each other, to my eyes at least. The Lian Li's walnut trim is going to be more noticeable than the front slats on the North XL, especially if you don't have your case facing you (as I do). The Lancool 217 doesn't have a fancy-looking power button, but it does come with two of them!

Tipping the whole thing in favor of the Lian Li case, though, is the fact that the North XL is $137 at Newegg. I know a difference of $17 isn't massive, but when they're matched almost everywhere else, and the Lian Li is better for cooling, it's an easy win for Lancool 217.

👉Check out all of Newegg's PC case deals👈

With Cyber Monday around the corner, you know what that means—my obsession becomes all the more pronounced. End of year sales events are the perfect time to add to my lilac horde, and I've just spotted a deal that ventures beyond my usual penchant for purple peripherals, bringing a splash of indigo to your PC case.

Personally, I've been pining after a purple Hyte Y70 PC case since it was first unveiled during last year's Computex. Now, I'm a little closer to realising the dream of an all-purple hardware loadout thanks to the fact you can get the Hyte Y70 Mid-Tower ATX PC case for only $180 from Amazon.

• We're curating all the best Cyber Monday PC gaming deals over here

Okay, okay, I'll level with you—this deal doesn't just apply to the purple colourway; you could also pick up the Hyte Y70 PC case in either a similarly pastel pink or blue for only $180 as well. But to me, the purple is the most appealing of the bunch—even without the LCD panel of the pricier Y70 Touch Infinite models.

You're still getting fishtank style though, with glass that wraps around three edges of this mid-tower PC case. Inside, you also get a PCIE 4.0 x 16 graphics card riser—to set your card upright in the case—with a similarly purple-toned canopy.

As for cooling, the Hyte Y70 PC case can support side radiators that measure up to 360 mm. The Y70 also offers 'cold floor cooling,' giving you the choice between installing three 120mm fans or two 140 mm fans that are up to 32 mm thick inside the case's base.

The whole case is designed to make the installation process as straightforward as possible too, with handy labels and even velcro straps for tucking away unruly wires. Storage media in particular is super easy to install thanks to this case's floating sleds you can load up and slot in through two openings on the back.

The only thing I'm personally left wanting from this case is maybe a few more front-facing USB ports. As it is, you get a 3.5 mm audio and mic combo jack, plus two USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports, and a USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 port. That's going to be more than enough for some folk, especially when your choice of motherboard will give you plenty more ports to play with at the back. However for me, between charging all my purple peripherals and connecting via my collection of lilac 2.4 GHz dongles, I'd still argue even one more USB-A port wouldn't hurt. Guess I'll just have to get a USB hub—in mauve, of course.

👉Click here for all of Amazon's PC case deals👈

It's not every day that I get to review a piece of computing hardware that's almost specifically designed for me, but that's exactly what Thermal Grizzly's Der8enchtable is. Well, it was actually created by Roman 'der8auer' Hartung, in conjunction with Jon Sandström of ElmorLabs, to make it easier for them to test motherboards, CPUs, coolers, etc. And since he just so happens to be the CEO of Thermal Grizzly, it's now something that I can use for the same purposes, too.

For $269 (direct from Thermal Grizzly), you can have one as well, though let's be honest here: the Der8enchtable is going to be of zero use to the vast majority of PC enthusiasts. That's because it's simply an open-platform circuit board that you can connect a motherboard to, and separately control fans, pumps, and lights; it also provides external storage options so you don't have to use those on the motherboard.

It might be a bit 'inside baseball' but let me explain why this is so useful for hardware testing. When I get a new motherboard or CPU to review, I use a basic open-chassis to mount the motherboard and PSU, then wire it all up, and then spend a good amount of time installing the operating system and test software. I also have to mess about with the BIOS to get a consistent cooling profile, to ensure thermal results across tested products are comparable.

The Der8enchtable streamlines that whole process by centralising storage and fan control. It comes with two SATA ports and four MicroSD card slots that you can use to host operating systems, applications, or whatever you need to run and test the motherboard, etc. It doesn't matter that none of these are very fast, because CPU/mobo reviewing is set up in such a way that the measured performance of the product is independent of items such as storage drives.

To see how well all this works in reality, I configured two separate SATA SSDs: one for an AMD AM5 system and the other for Intel LGA1851. On the edge of the Der8enchtable, there are two SATA sockets that are outputs: you connect them to the tested motherboard's own SATA ports via separate cables. It all worked exactly as intended, and for testing AMD/Intel motherboards, all I now need to do is just plug in the appropriate SATA cable.

In the case of the MicroSD slots, these communicate with a motherboard via a dedicated USB 2.0 header which, just like the SATA outputs, you hook up via an included USB cable. None of these options is what you'd call speedy, but as previously mentioned, that doesn't matter. What you want here is stability and compatibility, and USB 2.0 is ideal for this.

If you want a very simple setup, the only thing you need to connect to the Der8enchtable is the aforementioned USB 2.0 header and a six-pin PCIe power cable from a PSU. The latter can be mounted underneath Thermal Grizzly's circuit board, though this mandates the use of the included black-anodized aluminium legs and brackets.

Should the motherboard being tested not have onboard power and reset buttons, the Der8enchtable has headers for those, and you just connect them directly to the motherboard's. The same goes for fan, pump, and RGB headers: use them as normal on the mobo or splice them into the Der8enchtable and control them that way.

It's all very easy to put together (easier still if you don't take the same cavalier approach to instruction manuals that I have) and straightforward to use. Naturally, it does require that you understand how all the various headers and ports work, to a certain degree, but you wouldn't be testing motherboards if you didn't.

You don't have to install the legs to raise the Der8enchtable, to make room for a PSU, and neither do you have to fit the PCI slot bracket (to support GPUs, etc) or the radiator brackets. Screw the four little feet onto the underside of the board, and you can have a very low-profile test platform. Personally, I prefer it with everything attached, if only because it looks so good that way.

And speaking of looks, the Der8enchtable also sports ARGB lighting, all around the edge, which gets enabled if you connect the board's ARGB external header to any such equivalent on a motherboard. Completely superfluous for benchmarking and reviews, of course, but it really does look spectacular, and I'm not a huge RGB fan.

At the risk of sounding overly gushing, everything about the Der8enchtable is extremely good. From the build quality of the board, to the fit of the attachments and the detail of the instruction manual, Hartung et al have done a superb job. In fact, I'd go as far as saying that it's of a better quality than most $600+ motherboards, though it's not mass-manufactured to the same degree as those. Even the packaging is top-tier in quality.

This is also why it's pretty expensive for what it is. Paying nearly $270 for a circuit board with basic components and lights, along with a few pieces of aluminium, might seem excessive, but the market for the Der8enchtable is going to be very small. It's a niche product and as such, costs can't be recouped via selling it in large volumes.

For the right person, though, $270 is a bargain, especially for something that's so well-made and so useful. I suspect I'm not the only one who feels this way because at the time of writing, the Der8enchtable is out of stock on Thermal Grizzly's site. I should imagine every hardware reviewer and top overclocker around has already bought one, especially the latter, because if you're using liquid nitrogen for cooling, having storage drives kept well away from that stuff is a good thing.

Could it be even better? That depends on your needs. For example, if it were E-ATX-sized or sported M.2 or U.2 slots, it would be fantastic for handling workstation/server-grade boards or testing the throughput rates of a motherboard's various ports. But adding all of that would make it considerably more expensive, and such scenarios are even more niche than what it's already designed for.

As it is, the Thermal Grizzly Der8enchtable is pretty much the perfect platform for any hardware tester, reviewer, or super-serious overclocker. My only problem with it is now I want another one… maybe even two. Actually, I can think of a third scenario for one. Oh my poor wallet.

If you're shopping around for a new home for your gaming PC, or looking to build a brand new rig, I've spotted a seriously good deal for you. It's a case I reviewed earlier this year and liked a lot, considering its budget-friendly price tag. Now it's even more affordable.

It's the Thermaltake S100 TG. Now down to £30 over at Scan. It's a compact case that will fit up to a Micro-ATX-sized motherboard and is available in white or black. I've used the white version and come away pretty impressed with what it offers for the money—it cuts corners, but nowhere too important. In fact, it's currently our pick for the best compact budget PC case.

• We're scouting around for the best Black Friday PC gaming deals.

You can read my Thermaltake S100 TG review for more, but here's a basic breakdown.

You get one fan in the case, a basic 120 mm model from Thermaltake. That's pre-installed in the rear of the machine. You'll have to source some fans for the front, which has space for 3x 120 mm, but you can buy a few Arctic P12 fans for pretty cheap these days—£5 a pop—and again, I've used these and recommend them as the best budget PC fans going. Buy two and you're essentially buying the case at full price with two extra fans ready to go. Not bad at all. Buy three and you're sorted.

The case itself is a uniform white colour. That might sound like a given, but uniformity can be an issue on some white PC parts, especially budget ones. That's not the case here, though; it's clean. And you can gaze into its interior through the included tempered glass side panel.

The case offers plenty of room for an air cooler, as I used for my test build, but you could opt for a 280 or 240 mm radiator if required. The way the front of the case is designed doesn't leave much space for a radiator and fans up front, however, so a 360 mm isn't possible.

The rear expansion slot covers are non-reusable. Once you pry them off, they're gone for good, but that's pretty normal on budget PC cases. Other than that, my only other major complaint is the lack of cable management in the rear. You'll have to make good use of zip-ties.

Otherwise, it's a pretty solid case. Especially for the money. This is an early Black Friday deal, but we'll soon have the full sweep of deals going live. If you're interested, we'll be covering everything over on our Black Friday PC gaming deals page.

👉 Check out Thermaltake's Black Friday deals at Scan 👈

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Airflow and aesthetics don't often mix in the world of PC cases. Thermaltake, however, has done a pretty good job of it here. The Thermaltake View 390 Air swaps a top panel for tempered glass to excellent effect, leaving plenty of options for direct airflow over your components.

I received the View 390 Air in its white variant for review. This being called 'Snow' and offering a suitably frosty finish across most parts of the case. Though there are a few colourways to choose from, including a delectable-sounding Butter Caramel (yellow) and, my personal favourite, Future Dusk (purple). Or just plain black if you're a bit boring.

Upon opening the box, I had a feeling I might end up a little disappointed with the View 390 Air. The case doesn't make a good first impression, in large part thanks to the bag of loose screws hanging in the rear. This, I dare say, is the messiest bag of bolts ever called 'accessories' I've experienced with a PC case—a jangling selection of screws, zip-ties, and a roll of Velcro, looking like the world's worst party favour.

Compared to the Corsair Frame 4500X and Arctic Xtender, both of which come with neatly labelled accessory boxes, the Thermaltake's first impression doesn't match up.

I'm glad to say this impression didn't last for long. Upon taking a step back and planning out my test build, I started to nod my head in agreement with Thermaltake's design team here. This is kinda cool, I do get what they were going for here. There are lots of ways to lay it out.

Yes… yes… it's starting to come together.

The tempered glass side panel sweeps across the top of the case. Firstly, it looks cool, and we can't discount the impact looking cool has on a prospective PC builder. Secondly, it allows more light in. At risk of sounding like I'm a listing for a loft conversion-turned-rental property, it creates an airy and open feel that's really rather appealing. It helps to show off your components without the need for the nuclear option: RGB lighting. I'll take that opportunity whenever it's presented to me. Thirdly, it allows for much more direct airflow from forward-mounted fans, as opposed to the right-angled airflow offered by many a fish tank case.

I do have a few small qualms with the design. The biggest is the I/O. A selection of two USB Type-A ports, a Type-C port, and a headphone jack, it's all set weirdly far back from the front of the case. It's not really front I/O so much as rear I/O. I have the case to the side of my desk and I have to stand up to reach the on switch. I'm lazy, I don't like standing up when I don't have to, but I also struggle to think when this I/O position would be better than something further forward.

Then there's the use of silver screws. Personally, I'd prefer black thumbscrews and screws throughout. Contrary to what you might assume, black blends in a little better with white components that often still have a large amount of black bits on them. But, generally, I think the View 390 Air gets away with it. Just.

Lastly, this is not a tool-free design. Screws are require to remove various parts. This isn't the worst thing in the world and only really requires a screwdriver for the actual build process—accessing the case requires a few thumbscrews only—but as more case manufacturers move to increasingly tool-free designs, the Thermaltake does feel just a little old fashioned.

With my bag o' bits in hand, I set about putting together my test build. This includes: AMD Ryzen 7 9700X, Gigabyte X870 Aorus Elite Wifi7 Ice, Gigabyte RTX 5070 Ti Eagle OC Ice, and 64 GB of Crucial Pro DDR5-6000, Cooler Master MasterLiquid Core II, and Biwin X570 Pro 2 TB.

All picked for their white colourway, where possible, to match the View 390 Air. For one obvious omission: the liquid cooler. Though my partner assures me that the black on this component "looks fine, good even". So there's that.

Cooling is pretty simple here. The View 390 Air can take up to two 200 mm fans in the front, three 120 mm fans in the bottom, three 120 mm fans down the side, and two 120 mm fans in the rear (with two CT120 fans coming preinstalled). It's not short of options, and more importantly, you can opt for a pretty straightforward intake in the front, exhaust out the back approach—albeit with your radiator mounted down the side.

I'd recommend using reversed fans with the View 390 Air—fans with push/pull orientation switched—as this would allow for more aesthetically pleasing intake fans mounted in the bottom or side locations. I don't have any reversed fans in white, so I had to go with the not-so-optimal approach.

I've opted for two Havn H14 fans up front, three Havn H12 fans in the bottom, and kept the two included CT120 fans in the rear. I also replaced the RGB fans on the liquid cooler with Havn H12 fans in black, mostly because I don't have more white ones, and also I'm at a time in my life where I'm absolutely fed up with RGB lighting. It's a bit of a shame that there's no room for wider fans in the side or bottom mounting locations in the View 390 Air, though generally I've been impressed with it in terms of cooling compatibility.

What's important is that temperatures are great, with three runs of Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition seeing the GPU/CPU hit 59°C and 60°C, respectively.

There's a good amount of room for a graphics card in the View 390 Air: 390 mm or 420 mm if you don't have anything else in the front. Even the largest graphics cards today won't exceed that. There's also an included GPU support with a good range of adjustment for various sized cards. I just wish the silver thumbscrews—of which there are many—weren't so obvious.

Though it is a little limited in terms of height from the motherboard to the tempered glass side panel. It's a little unfair, but I tested whether the Noctua NH-D15 G2 would fit, the largest air cooler I had to hand, and it was just a touch too big. The heatsink touches the glass—the thought alone makes me shudder. Though any more sensibly sized cooler will be just fine.

The rear of the case offers a pretty smart design for cable management. There's not much of it—a notable lack of straps or channels—but wait, there is a door that covers everything up. So you don't need to be quite as neat to get it squared away and looking good. The door covers everything up. The door makes the pain go away.

Sure, I'd like to see some more integrated cable management options here, outside of the usual inclusion of zip-ties. Especially as you have to cut your own Velcro straps from a small roll provided in the box. It's all a bit hands-on and, any changes, you'll need to start from scratch after you've cut it all free.

One thing I have for this build, but I probably wouldn't recommend, is Thermaltake's own 6-inch screen. There's a convenient cut-out at the top of the case for the screen to sit in, and it fits together very easily, with only a single cable run required for a USB 2.0 connection. The screen itself is controlled via Thermaltake's TT RGB Plus app. But the app is laggy and confusing, and the screen is extremely expensive for what it is. I've struggled to find an official price but I think it's somewhere in the region of $100/£100.

The Thermaltake View 390 Air, however, costs $150/£125. Perhaps even less if it's on sale, which it is as I write this, for $120. That makes the screen seem even more over the decadent than it is, at near the same price as the entire case. Ignoring the screen, however, I do have generally good feelings for the Thermaltake View 390 Air.

When I stand back and gaze upon my creation, I realise just how much I like that expansive window wrapping around the top of the case. It's really nice. No, better than that, it's lovely. It opens the case up to a lot more light and that helps show off the build more than any RGB lighting ever could. While Thermaltake could tighten up a few things here and there to make the holistic build experience better, the finished product is something worthy of showing off.

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You don't have to have lived through a certain era to be a fan of it, but the best retro vibes one can experience are with those that spark the memories you have of those times. If you've been a PC enthusiast for as long as I have, then you'll probably look at SilverStone's new full-tower case with a warm heart and happy, fuzzy feelings.

That's because the SST-FLP02 is as close to a PC case from the late 1980s, early 1990s, as you could possibly get, without trawling through eBay to source a genuine one. We first laid eyes on it back in May, at the annual Computex event, but it's now officially on the market, with an asking price of $240.

I know that's a lot of money to spend on a case, but to be fair to SilverStone, it's a niche product that isn't going to shift in enormous quantities. Low-volume sellers nearly always sport high price tags to make them financially viable for the manufacturer. So what exactly are you getting for your two hundred and forty dollars?

Internally, it's pretty much a standard full-tower case, with room for a 360 mm radiator at the top and space for graphics cards no longer than 386 mm. It comes with two 120 mm fans installed at the front, below the row of buttons in the middle, plus another one at the rear. It's probably not going to win any awards for airflow, though, as the PSU shroud at the bottom is very long.

What it will win at is tugging the heartstrings of PC enthusiasts who remember building rigs in very similar cases, a great many decades ago. You get a nice big red power switch (no push button to power up your rig here), followed by a physical lock to disable the power and reset switches, as well as a famous (infamous?) Turbo button.

Originally, this was used to force CPUs to run slower (yes, I know, very confusing). Intel's processors of the late 1980s, such as the 80486, were speedy beasts, but many apps at the time didn't like that raw clock speed so much. Hitting the turbo button dropped the chip's clock speed right down, making the whole system compatible with older games and programs.

In the case of the SST-FLP02, though, the turbo button boosts the fans to their maximum rpm (kinda the opposite of what it did, I guess). I reckon it would be more useful if it could be used to cycle through some predefined fan speeds, instead of going straight to all-hell-breaking-loose mode. The little LED display next to the turbo button displays the fan's rpm (0 to 100%), if you were wondering.

At the top of the front of the case, there are four fake 5.25-inch floppy drives. It's just a door that opens up, but behind it are three real 5.25-inch drive bays. So if you've been hankering for a case that lets you install a couple of optical disk burners or a raft of hot-swappable storage drives, then the SST-FLP02 might just be the case for you.

Naturally, the whole thing is beige in colour, because that was the only choice you had back then. In fact, if it weren't for the likes of Apple and its 'DayGlo' original iMac, we might still be toting monochromatic machines even now. Oh, wait a second, we do. It's just that they're black or white, with glass everywhere.

I have to confess that if I were looking to build a one-off special PC, I'd seriously consider using SilverStone's blast from the past. It would make for an awesome sleeper build, though I dare say jamming an RTX 5090 inside one of these might cause a few problems pertaining to heat. That turbo button would certainly get a workout or two.

With seas of stock to maintain, plus piles of product pages to go along with every item, listing mistakes happen. Should an eagle-eyed shopper scoop a downright unreasonably priced bit of kit, it's often a toss up as to whether the supplier will either cancel the order, or quietly honour the few orders that get through before promptly updating the listing and acting like nothing happened. Either way, most companies would avoid making much noise about it.

Apparently, London-based Gotraka isn't like most companies. One lucky Redditor spied an absurdly good deal on the black midi version of the Fractal Design North PC case. Gotraka normally sells this case for around £155 (about $205), but the poster snapped it up when it was briefly listed for only £20 (a little under $27).

Gotraka not only honoured this incredibly low price, but even sent the buyer a note with their order. This read, "We made a pricing mistake. You made it go viral. So we did what we believe is right—we owned it."

Gotraka itself has since shared a blog post going into more depth about how the pricing mistake happened. Apparently, the company has been in the process of developing a custom build system for its website. 'Team Gotraka' explained, "To get it ready, our dev team has been testing the matrix (literally). They’ve been linking thousands of parts, compatibility data, and live pricing. And somewhere in that tangled web of code and caffeine, one of our test prices slipped into the live site."

Rather than cancel the resulting orders, the company chose to treat it as a happy accident even calling the pricing mistake's popularity "the best kind of beta test we could’ve asked for." What could've been a quiet embarrassment has been leveraged into a far louder, profile-raising win for the smaller UK brand.

A short story in 4 images from r/pcmasterrace

But, in Gotraka's own words, it's a principled brand that "stands by our word." On the subject of principles, an interesting side note is that Gotraka bills itself as a company with sustainability in mind.

The company's About page not only references the UK's own mountains of e-waste, but also briefly discusses Gotraka's own hopes for a circular supply system, reading, "We want to recover as much product as we can to reduce the mining of new resources." It'll be interesting to see if this smaller company can leverage its new-found visibility into a less e-wasteful future.

In this age of instant gratification, of ecommerce orders that arrive via drone an hour before you realised you even wanted them, there's definitely something to be said for adding a delay, maybe a touch of ritual, perhaps a dash of overkill. Enter the Power Button Extension V2, surely the most satisfying start up routine for a desktop rig yet conceived by human mind.

The work of a Redditor who goes by the call sign veloci_official, this powering-up solution involves a pair of flip switches and key activator as gateway keepers to the all-important "Start" button which is, of course, housed beneath a clear, flip-up cover. Each element sports an all-caps label—POWER, FUEL, IGNITION, START—fitted slightly askew for a pleasing DIY-come-military vibe.

The flip switches and turn-key are, in effect, only contact switches that act to enable the "Start" button. In other words, once the PC is running, an accidental knock of one of those switches or a twitch of the key won't do anything other than make the Start button inoperable, thereby making accidental shutdowns, perhaps courtesy of a passing feline, far less likely.

The green LED above the Start button, incidentally, is a hard drive activity indicator. Dare I say it, this could be just the thing for flight or driving sim aficionados looking to add that extra layer of authenticity to their desk-bound pre-sortie routine.

Of course, pedantic military wonks might suggest this setup actually needs two keys, 12 feet apart, that need to be turned simultaneously in order to completely rule out accidental system boots. Turn your key, sir! Etc.

As for me, I'm more of a jam-a-screw-driver-directly-into-the-motherboard-headers kinda chap. But if I absolutely had to use an actual switch, then I like the idea of entirely leapfrogging a plain old button and going straight to absolute overkill.

Whatever, if barking "CONTACT" every time you boot up is your bag, you'll be pleased to hear there's a Github listing with detailed instructions including circuit diagrams and links to all the parts you'll need. The instructions really are comprehensive and aimed at DIY novices. So, you really needn't be an electrical engineer to knock one of these out yourself.

Cost-wise, you're looking at about five bucks all in for the parts, plus whatever it costs to 3D print the main housing. Remarkably, that includes the USB-C trigger board that's required to light up the toggle-switch LEDs.

Heck, you'd could probably cobble something together out of wood if 3D printing wasn't an option and make this thing for virtually nothing. And in these times of spiralling PC component prices, a bit of fun for almost free is a very welcome distraction.