We're looking at the best gaming PC cases for 2025 for custom PC builds. This round-up benchmarks the best airflow cases, tests for best thermals, acoustics, cable management, build quality, and more

The Highlights

• Best Overall Case: Fractal Meshify 3
• Best Mechanical Design: HAVN BF 360
• Best Sub-$100 Class Case: Lian Li 207
• Best Mid-Range Case: Corsair Frame 4000D RS
• Most Innovative Case: HYTE X50

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

Intro

This round-up highlights the best cases we think are available in 2025, and it’s based on another year of extensive thermal benchmarks, acoustic tests, build quality analysis, and case reviews. The case collection has grown this year as we’ve now tested and reviewed hundreds of PC cases, but only a handful will get recognized today.

The year had everything from bubbly, risk-taking cases to modernized retro-themed cases, with plenty of performance cases in between.

Editor's note: This was originally published on November 27, 2025 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

Credits

Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Video Editing

Vitalii Makhnovets
Tim Phetdara

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

The good news is that there are a ton of really good cases right now, and this past year, in particular has been stronger for the cases we’ve reviewed than most others in our history. The bad news is that the entire rest of the industry is on fire (see here), but at least we have a sanctuary in cases.

Overview: Best PC Cases for 2024

Genuinely, this year and last year have been some of the best years for cases we’ve seen in a really long time consecutively. This is awesome. There’s good innovation and interesting aesthetic designs that don’t sacrifice performance. 

For this story, we’re going to look at the best budget cases under $100, the best thermals, the best noise-normalized thermals, the best-out-of-the-box thermals, the most innovative, and the most mechanically complex cases over the past year. Specifically, we’re narrowing our scope to cases that came out towards the tail end of 2024 up until now. 

Best Overall Case: Fractal Meshify 3 

Fractal Meshify 3: Original review | Amazon

Our first award goes to the Best Overall Case for 2025. Like last year, this was difficult to figure out for 2025 -- and that’s great news, because the case market is thriving with excellent advancements in design and performance. We talked through the many options: The Best Overall has to be universally good, including for thermal performance, acoustic performance in the chamber, value and price, build quality, aesthetics, ease-of-installation features, and cable management, and again, it all has to be priced reasonably.

The Fractal Meshify 3 is our Best Overall Case for 2025, and in particular, the Meshify 3 Ambience Pro RGB (read our review) and the cheaper and less flashy Meshify 3 RGB. There are some better cases in individual areas, but we think this is a masterclass overall. We considered the HAVN BF 360 (read our review) for this category, but it just wasn’t technically the best thermal performer despite being good and is an expensive case. The Hyte X50 (read our review) was also in close consideration, as was the Lancool 217, but while they ticked many boxes, they didn’t tick all of them like the Meshify 3 does with its new price.

If not for the new price, the Meshify 3 would have lost it to one of these other cases. But now, the Meshify 3 Ambience Pro RGB is $130 to $144, a steep fall from the $220 launch price earlier this year. That instantly qualifies it for value consideration, especially with the $105-$110 price of the non-Ambience version (although we do think the lighting feature is key to the case).

The Meshify 3 Ambience Pro RGB brings back Fractal’s angular mesh front panel design and geometric pattern, using an ultra-fine mesh that breathes well while filtering dust as a byproduct. From some angles, it looks like a low-poly 3D render, and we mean that as a compliment. The way the light interacts with the case is well done, and Fractal’s use of the RGB lighting strips on its now $80-cheaper Ambience model shows care and attention put into something that we’ve memed on for a decade now, rather than just gluing an LED into a fan and calling it a day.

The attention to detail extends beyond the LEDs, for those who care more about function: The integrated scoop in the power supply shroud actually helps in thermal performance, which we showed in our benchmarking. The rear foot of the case serves as a handle for the power supply dust filter, which is completely unnecessary but awesome attention to detail and good usability. This trend of attention-to-detail is nearly everywhere in the case, including deep cable management channels with durable plastic clips for cable management, included velcro straps at the rear of the case for securing external cables, and a motherboard tray cable cutout that runs the full length of the board to give freedom of routing without sacrificing tray strength. We also liked the panel quality, such as the top panel for its excellent removal and installation process, including a sturdy frame to reduce wobble. The front panel uses pogo pins to socket into the chassis for the LED strip, avoiding a wire.

Clever functional features include flippable fan rail mounts that allow 120mm or 140mm fans to be mounted without either one being obstructed by the rails for the other. We see cases all the time that support multiple sizes, but block the flow of the larger fans with the rails that are present for the smaller ones. By using a mechanically clever and simple flippable rail, Fractal is able to leave both unobstructed without complicating the build process.

The two SKUs we’re recommending come with 3x 140mm fans pre-installed at the front. It’s this configuration that allowed Fractal to hit th e top slot in some of our charts back when we reviewed it earlier this year, and even as recently as our Hyte X50 and HAVN BF 360 reviews, the Meshify 3 held at least one of the top entries on the charts.

This is a resolute successor to the Fractal Torrent (watch our review), although completely different in the execution of how it got to the top of the chart.

Most of our criticisms of the case were related to its price, but that’s now resolved entirely. We had some smaller complaints, like the cable cutout in the power supply shroud being undersized. Overall though, the Fractal Meshify 3 performs excellently and is a chart-topper in some cases, or top 5 in all cases, while also executing with solid build quality and now competitive pricing against its peers.

Fractal’s Meshify 3 Ambience Pro RGB and non-Ambience RGB are deserving winners of our Best Overall Case of 2025 award. The runners-up are HAVN’s BF 360, which engineered the hell out of a unique case, and HYTE’s X50 for its manufacturing feats. Both of these still get separate awards, though.

Best Mechanical Design: HAVN BF 360

HAVN NF 360: Original review | Amazon

The next award is for the best mechanical design. This is given to cases that innovated the most on design execution for complicated mechanical elements, masterful simplifications of complex features, or other well thought-out improvements that might not earn a spot elsewhere in the awards, but should be acknowledged.

This year, we’re giving the Best Mechanical Design award to the HAVN BF 360 Flow. Read our review. The BF 360 is a $190 case highly focused on airflow and performance, with extensive engineering behind it.

The case has a lot of smaller mechanical attention to detail: HAVN fine-tuned the bottom ramp for cooling and experimented with different curvatures, bowl shapes, flat ramps, and angles, ultimately settling on what they shipped for its ability to better project air straight into the GPU-side of video card coolers. The case also includes a re-circulation prevention plate (similar to a server rack), so you can plate-out and block the empty area of the front panel after adjusting the fan location. 

We tested this in A/B benchmarks and found that the backflow prevention plate actually works and does help with thermals. 

In smoke testing, we saw a slight recirculation effect on the inside of the case behind the plate, meaning that this air would likely exit and re-enter without it.

Likewise, the panel design uses large slats that are carefully shaped to minimize plastic obstruction at the blade tips of the fans while still maintaining structural integrity of the panel. This is something a lot of companies don’t pay attention to when placing structural support for panels. 

The BF 360 also has rubber grommets at nearly every metal-to-metal contact point in the case, which we’ve come to appreciate. Panel materials are also of high quality, like the front panel with its faux stone coloring and speckled pattern, which just happens to align with older keyboard and case plastics.

HAVN also has a number of areas of finer attention to detail and mechanical design, such as carefully-placed cable routing pathways that we almost never found ourselves disagreeing with. 

These are even labeled and, despite a typo on literally all of them that reads, "Recommendned," we appreciated the thought for newer builders who may need the help.

The case’s fans are a big part of its engineering. Although there is a $160 fan-less version, a lot of what HAVN is doing comes down to the fans. The Flow variant includes 2x 180mm front fans that run 40mm deep, which helps with static pressure performance and gives the fans a wide area of impact. The rear fan is a 120mm x 30mm deep solution. 

This 3-fan configuration performed well overall, but didn’t quite crack the best rank in our charts. 

Adding two more 180mm fans to the top situates the BF 360 Flow as the best air-cooled solution we’ve tested yet for our case reviews, though.

Our review included fan tests on our fan testing machine, including A/B comparisons with the Fractal Torrent for P/Q. 

This was in addition to our thermal benchmarks for the BF 360 Flow, which had it overall competitive. It’s not the best, but it’s up there with the best and its mechanical design is excellent.

Overall, we liked the BF 360 Flow for its design and mechanical complexity. We’d even say we it is “recommendned.” 

Best Sub-$100 Class Case: Lian Li 207

Lian Li Lancool 207: Original review | Amazon

Our next category is for the best case under $100. Despite the lack of competition in the $50-$60 price point in the last 5 years, the sub-$100 point has continued to see competitive releases. If you’re buying closer to $50-$60, we think you should buy used instead if possible.

So, for Best Sub-$100 Case, Lian Li holds onto the award for a second year in a row due to its still unbeatable thermal performance and its aggressive, cutthroat pricing. Lian Li continues to show a level of pricing aggression that its competitors struggle to match, at least, until Thermalright finalizes its plans to bring PC cases to the market -- it had promised a $45 case earlier this year which, to Lian Li’s credit, it also mentioned.

In the year since the 207 (read our review) won this award last time, it has faced some new competition. We’ll cover those first since this is a repeat winner:

The Fractal Epoch (read our review) case is a Fractal North (watch our review) with a different, cheaper front panel. Otherwise, the tooling is almost entirely the same, the case just loses the panel. Our viewers said Fractal should have called it the South. The price has come down since launch, with the RGB variant including 3x 120mm fans now priced at about $90 on Newegg. That makes it a serious competitor to the 207, but the North was primarily special for its front panel (with the rest of the tooling standard) and the thermal performance of the Epoch can’t beat the 207 in our noise-normalized testing. As for the XT Pro Ultra from Phanteks, we thought the case was simply “fine,” but was otherwise mechanically and thermally unremarkable. The Corsair Frame 4000D RS ARGB (read our review) is a strong competitor, as is Lian Li’s own 217.

But, of all of these sub-$100 cases that we’ve tested, the 207 is still the best. The 207 includes 2x 120mm bottom-mounted intake fans that pull through the ventilated side panel and the rear of the case, where typically the power supply would sit. These push air straight into the GPU, helping it achieve some of the best cooling on our charts -- even against cases 2x the price. The 207 also has 2x 140mm front-mounted fans and, given the short nature of the case, the air doesn’t have to travel far to hit the CPU cooler and GPU.

The 207’s noise-normalized CPU thermals put it ahead of the G400A D-RGB, the 4000D RS ARGB, Antec Flux non-Pro (and it’s tied with the Pro), Phanteks XT Pro Ultra that competes on price, and significantly ahead of the Montech XR (read our review) in a similar price class. The noise-normalized GPU thermals also keep it up in the top 3 of our X50 review chart, right behind the Flux Pro (read our review), long-king Fractal Torrent, and within error of the Lancool 217.

A lot of the 207’s cooling performance is achieved by moving the power supply to the front of the case, giving room at the back for better-positioned intake fans. The downside to this is the additional complications for power supply installation and cable management, including a sharper bend of the cables and limited depth for packing them all in. In our Lancool 207 review, we talked about how the side panel can bulge without snapping the center snaps if not strictly managing cables, which is resolvable, but requires additional effort and can be annoying -- particularly in cable-heavy builds or with thicker custom cables.

Other than this key downside, the case executes nearly flawlessly on its thermal goals for its price and its price does let it get away with a lot of other tiny annoyances. For example, although it supports larger, we recommend a 150mm-deep power supply as the maximum size to help with some of the cable issues. We still also recommend adding an extra dust filter to the rear former PSU vent, basically the intake vent for the bottom fans, just to help with dust management since it has larger holes than a front panel.

Even with the thermal focus at the price, the case still manages to include a relatively full feature set of velcro straps, USB type-C, ARGB fans, and relatively good build quality.

Best Mid-Range Case: Corsair Frame 4000D RS

Corsair Frame 4000D RS: Original review | Amazon

Our next category is for the Best Mid-Range case. This category is awarded to a case that isn’t too expensive and sticks to the usual playbook for making just a good, mid-level priced case. This year, we’re giving it to the Corsair Frame 4000D RS ARGB.

Corsair had a rough few years of case launches, but the Frame series turned it around by reviving the successful 4000D and 5000D cases and overhauling them. 

The Frame series cases are most interesting for their modularity. This includes a fully removable motherboard tray with a few screws, a power supply shroud that can be easily removed to fully open-up the case, a removable PCIe bracket that can rotate for vertical or horizontal GPU installation, and fan rails with fixed width spacing but free vertical spacing for precise positioning of the fans.

Corsair has managed to make its Frame case modular without it becoming overly gimmicky, and more importantly, unlike many of its contemporaries, it’s done it without ballooning the cost for a feature most will only use once. Back when we reviewed it, we criticized Corsair for launching its expansible case without any expansions or spare parts. Now, it has a page full of replacement components, extra fan rails, fan clips, glass panels, and so on. Corsair still hasn’t taken full advantage of its plans for alternate panels, though. Its store has spare parts available, which is nice, but the bold vision for alternative panel designs that can just be ordered from Corsair seem to have largely fallen flat.

The Frame 4000D deploys a strange 3D Y-shaped front panel that manages structural rigidity while also having some of the highest percent porosity of any of the cases we tested this year, which helps with airflow. It’s not as clean-looking as the original, flatter 4000D, but does manage to open up the chassis for flow performance without making it so perforated that it becomes flimsy. Corsair also heavily ventilated the top of the Frame 4000D, the rear, and the lower side panel (below the glass). 

With the Frame 4000D RS ARGB including its fans, the case landed in the top quarter of noise-normalized CPU thermal results (between some Fractal North XL listings – read our review), although it was more middling in our GPU thermal results when noise-normalized.

For these reasons, the Frame 4000D RS, which is about $90, didn’t get our Best Sub-$100 case. It’s just not strictly better than the Lancool 207 in that price category, but from a build quality standpoint and for its versatility, it’s still a good case that belongs on the list. The ARGB variant that includes fans puts it into the mid-range category at typically about $125, although lately, the case has been available for around $100 with fans. We don’t know if that’s temporary.

The Corsair Frame 5000D RS ARGB is basically the same case. But it is scaled up. That one’s closer to $180-$200 with fans. If the Frame 4000D is what you want, but too small, the Frame 5000D fills that segment; however, Corsair does have a ton more competition at the $180-$200 price point.

Best Noise-Normalized Case Thermals: Meshify 3, Lancool 217, & Flux Pro

Fractal Meshify 3: Original review | Amazon
Lian Li Lancool 217: Original review | Amazon
Antec Flux Pro: Original review | Amazon

Our next award is for Best Noise-Normalized Case Thermals, which combines acoustics and thermals for a simple, objective scoring. This time, there are 3 winners; one for 3 different categories. 

The winners are the Fractal Meshify 3 Ambience Pro RGB for CPU noise-normalized thermals, the Lancool 217 for VRM & RAM noise-normalized thermals, and the Antec Flux Pro for GPU thermals. 

For this testing, we position the cases in our hemi-anechoic chamber with a microphone 1 meter away, then adjust fan speeds of the case fans -- but not the system fans -- until it hits a noise-normalized target of 27 dBA. This is using the fans included in the case. This levels the playing field to show some nuance beyond full-speed fan testing. 

The Fractal Meshify 3 came out earlier this year and immediately netted itself a new best result on our noise-normalized charts. When we reviewed it, the case instantly chart-topped for noise-normalized CPU thermal performance with a 44-degree P-core result over ambient. The Flux Pro, which came out late last year, maintains rank in the top cases for this same chart. Objectively, the Meshify 3 Ambience Pro RGB won this result with its combination of its 3x 140mm Momentum 14 RGB fans and its highly perforated front panel design.

In our noise-normalized VRM and DDR5 memory thermal testing, the top performers are the Lancool 217 and BF 360 Flow. Objectively though, across both the VRM and DDR5 thermal tests, the 217 technically is the victor for these.

For noise-normalized GPU thermals, the Fractal Torrent is still the top performer, but it’s tied by the Antec Flux Pro (which was one of our winners for thermal categories last year). The Flux Pro is closely trailed by the 207 and 217 Lian Li cases, with the X50 equipped with non-Pro (Flux) fans following those. Considering the Flux Pro’s better performance in other categories than the Torrent (and the age of the Torrent), we’re giving the GPU-side of this award to the Flux Pro for one more year running.

Best Out-of-the-Box Case Thermals

HAVN BF 360 Flow: Original review | Amazon
Lian Li Lancool 216: Original review | Amazon
Lian Li Lancool 207: Original review | Amazon
Antec Flux Pro: Original review | Amazon

Next up is the award for Best Out-of-the-Box Thermals, a GN classic. 

The winner for Best Out-of-the-Box Thermals is split between the HAVN BF 360 Flow for CPU results, tied with the older Lancool 216, and the Lancool 207 for GPU thermal results, tied with the Antec Flux Pro.

With full case fan speeds and testing CPU thermals, the best performer for our data set is the HAVN BF 360 Flow with extra fans installed -- but that’s not out-of-the-box, and this is for out-of-the-box thermals. Stock, the older 216 and the HAVN BF 360 Flow default configuration (without the extra fans) are both at the top of the results. The Hyte X50 with Flux fans is also up there, but that was an arbitrary choice as the case doesn’t include fans, and so it isn’t eligible here because, out of the box, it doesn’t have fans. Like the Torrent, the 216 is old enough that we’re ruling it out; however, it and the BF 360 are at about the same performance level, followed closely by the Lancool 217, which is newer.

For GPU thermals, the Lancool 207 and Antec Flux Pro hold the top of the chart. The BF 360 couldn’t quite make it to the top here, with its stock result landing down below the Lancool 217. Antec’s Flux Pro remains highly competitive now a year later, and we look forward to seeing what the Noctua version of the case can do once it comes out. Lian Li’s 207 manages better GPU memory thermal results than the Flux Pro and is tied in GPU temperature.

Most Innovative Case: HYTE X50

HYTE X50: Original review | Amazon

Our Most Innovative Case award is given to cases with the most different designs that take risks. That can be manufacturing, market, or performance risks, because innovation and risk pushes the industry forward. 

This year, the Most Innovative Case award goes to the HYTE X50 case. 

We’re giving a runner-up mark to the SilverStone FLP02 as well.

The Hyte X50 makes heavy use of metals, mesh, and curves. The case moves the power supply to its historic top-mount position and aimed to achieve top ranks in cooling performance with its perforations. 

Most notably, the manufacturing process involved figuring out how to edge-wrap fine mesh with moderate porosity to the corners of the panel, past the apex of the curve, and also figure out how to stamp and bend louvered slats to enable unobstructed exhaust while also strengthening the PCIe slot structure. We tested this with Schlieren photography in our lab and found that the louvered vents do actually work.

The case’s so-called “acoustic” glass didn’t do much for acoustics, although its lamination will help with containing shards in the event it ever shatters. 

Thermally, Hyte managed to achieve competitive performance when equipped with fans from the Antec Flux non-Pro, including beating the Flux non-Pro with its own fans in the noise-normalized CPU thermal test. It wasn’t the chart-topper that Hyte hoped for, but at least did acceptably. 

GPU thermals were far more promising for the Hyte X50 Air thanks to its mesh side panel, landing it toward the top of the chart with the Flux non-Pro fans. 

Our Schlieren photography showed that this was due, in part, to the mesh panel allowing GPU exhaust to exit and get away from the case more easily.

The case did OK overall, but that’s not why it gets an award.

The Hyte X50’s notably bubbly design gives it peerless differentiation in at least one category, which is its innovation on the manufacturing process to get there. Compound curves are a complicated manufacturing hurdle when trying to maintain structural integrity with thinner metals and high porosity.

Although easily achievable with cheaper plastic molding, doing this with metal meant that Hyte had to iterate through multiple trial-and-error manufacturing processes with its factories. This meant changing metal compositions to modulate strength, which sometimes resulted in rusting, changing the depth of the mesh wrap to increase structural rigidity, and changing with porosity of the holes (such as by reducing porosity at the perimeter to reduce tearing of metal, where the fan’s blades most need a porous surface). 

Although less challenging, Hyte also brought curved mesh to its side panel for one of the case variations, including mesh all the way up-and-around the top of the case.

In our technical discussion with Hyte product director Rob Teller at Computex this year, we learned about the process in-depth.

Additional manufacturing maneuvering included using a deep draw stamp for the power supply shroud, a process that’s more time-consuming, but allows more depth to a metal component with curves in it. The louvered slats also required close work with the factory to stamp and twist without ballooning cost or reducing yields.

There are areas that it still struggles, such as when our review talked about the creaking or flexing of panels in some locations. The panels can also be finicky when slotting them in place, requiring more attention to avoid an uneven mount. 

Even with that, we think the Hyte X50 managed to produce a different-looking case without sacrificing too much in terms of performance or other qualities. The $130 to $160 pricing also puts it in range of most of its modern competition, although lacking fans drives the functional price up.

Runner-Up: SilverStone FLP02

SilverStone FLP02: Original coverage

This category’s runner-up is the SilverStone FLP02, a retro-themed case that manages to modernize the functionality of an old look. We appreciated the concept of this case when we saw it at Computex. The case has 5.25” drive bays complete with retro-themed Floppy face covers, although you could complete the look with an actual IDE floppy drive. Center-front is a keyed power toggle, a “turbo” switch that boosts fans to 100% speed, and a reset button, plus a large seven segment display to show the fan speed.

The FLP02 lacks in some areas, like access to air, but still outdoes its predecessor inspiration while staying true to the style. The case modernizes the sleeper build, like with support for the large video cards of today and some radiator support. For these reasons, we give SilverStone the runner-up award for Most Innovative Case.

We test the Hyte X50 and X50 Air for thermals, acoustics, build quality, cable management, radiator and fan compatibility, drive support, and more

The Highlights

• The Hyte X50 and X50 Air cases take some risks on design but manage to do so while keeping thermal performance overall competitive
• We didn’t measure a noticeable difference in noise dampening from the laminated “acoustic glass”
• The case is weird, but we like it
• Original MSRP: $130-$160
• Release Date: November 2025

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

Intro

Today we’re reviewing the $130-$160 Hyte X50 airflow-focused case with a bubbly design, and it also has uniquely shaped, louvered vents at the back that should theoretically help evict air from the case faster. At least, that’s what Hyte is claiming. The company told us it was an engineering challenge for Hyte to stamp and retain the steel and then to bend it slightly. 

Editor's note: This was originally published on November 2, 2025 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

Credits

Test Lead, Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Testing, Writing

Patrick Lathan

Camera, Video Editing

Vitalii Makhnovets
Tim Phetdara

Camera, Schlierenmaster

Andrew Coleman

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

We also used our Schlieren imaging setup to illustrate this, which uses a parabolic lens and some lighting tricks to visualize the air density gradient around the case.

Rather than using smoke flow testing with its many inaccuracies and limitations, such as fog density, we can instead look at the refractive index changes caused by air density gradients that distort parallel light beams. 

A better exhaust path isn’t Hyte’s only claim we’re validating: 

Hyte says: “Laminated acoustic glass significantly enhances passive noise damping by reducing transmission of sound with a Shatter-Proof(ish) bonding layer.” Typically, laminated glass just keeps the glass together in the event it shatters, which Hyte also says, but the acoustic claim is new to us.

So we asked Hyte to send us a non-laminated panel with its laminated panel to test the concept in our acoustic chamber, which produced these frequency spectrum plots that we’ll talk about down below.

Mechanically, the case is unique and executed with excellent build quality: The X50 uses a continuous panel around the side and top in either glass or double mesh, with a mesh front panel that has edge-wrapped perforations for cooling. 

Pricing with tariffs in the US is $160 for the X50 with a glass side panel, or $130 for the X50 Air with a mesh side panel. Worldwide pricing is $150 for the X50 and $120 for the X50 Air. Neither case comes with fans, although they do sell color-matched fans.

Finally, at least for the review samples, Hyte included incredibly bad smelly candles. 

Specs

Specs copied from manufacturer materials, please read review for our own measurements and opinions

Overview

The rounded curves of the X50 are its most prominent feature, as well as the hardest to manufacture. The design is promising for airflow, with perforations that extend around the edge of the curve for maximum surface area. Specifically, getting the bent shape with mesh at the edges was difficult to manufacture without using plastic. 

During a visit to HYTE's office earlier this year, we showed several different panel designs that Hyte had experimented with, all of which were attempting to solve unique manufacturing challenges posed by what they ultimately went with. You should check that article out to see how down-to-the-wire the final concept came.

Even as it is, some of the most complex pieces are plastic. Color matching isn't perfect, but on our purple review sample, it's impressively good given that the paint, plastic, and silicone elements all have to be matched, and that almost every piece of the case has color. 

We have shots of some of the other colors, like glossy red, green, and pink from Computex. Hyte has been experimenting with non-black-and-white colors for a few case iterations now.

The Hyte X50 supports up to 3x 140mm front-mounted fans and has side and bottom support for 3x 120mm fans each. The case also fits one rear 120mm fan, so overall, fan sizes are relatively limited, mostly to 120mm fans. The front mount has 425mm of clearance from top to bottom, so typical 360mm radiators will fit and 420s will not. Radiators up to 105mm thick on the front and 70mm on the side are officially supported, but not simultaneously: assuming 25mm thick fans, you have about 25mm of radiator space on the side and about 35mm on the front before the two conflict with each other. Because the power supply is in the once-traditional top-mounted position, its fan also acts as exhaust. Power supplies are tested in ambient temperatures of 40-50 degrees Celsius, so they can handle this heat better than most components.

The front mount is the only one that's removable. It can be adjusted out in increments of 10mm, starting from either 0mm or 15mm, depending on which way the mounting hardware is flipped. The maximum 45mm offset shown in the manual doesn't actually fit with the front panel. Fortunately, we don’t think that will affect compatibility for anyone. Pushing the bracket back to 0mm means that it's flush with the front of the metal chassis; in other cases, we've found that this can help with thermals, but setting a 0mm offset makes it much harder to reach the cutouts for fan cables on the front of the chassis.

The X50 Air replaces the laminated tempered glass panel with a cheaper mesh panel. Neither variant includes fans, and all other panels are the same between the models. There isn’t a side mount for fans to take direct advantage of the Air's mesh panel (like the North's side fan bracket, for example), although downdraft CPU coolers and some GPU configurations could benefit from it.

Claimed motherboard support goes up to 10.6" for so-called “E-ATX”, but standard 9.6" ATX boards line up precisely with the edge of the motherboard tray and look much neater. 

Mechanically, the case is mostly a standard box but refined.

The side panels slide down onto the case and pop into position, with the larger panel that wraps over the top assisted by magnets. The magnets lead to some flexing of the Air's mesh, but the panel is supported on all edges by the shape of the chassis. The X50’s panels need to be pressed against the chassis at the same time as they're pressed down or they won't land flush, which the manual highlights. As we so frequently point out, there's no way to screw down the panels for shipping, although the way the panels are attached makes it unlikely they would ever come off with the case standing vertically.

The power supply shroud is a solid piece of steel and is fully enclosed except the bottom interior. This will help with CPU tower cooler exhaust, but we’d like to have seen an option that could be flipped to take advantage of the top ventilated panel as well. Maybe this was a choice to ensure users of the glass panel don’t accidentally orient the power supply the wrong way, or maybe it was for cost control, but the power supply can only pull from internally. Fortunately, they can handle the warmed air better than most parts. Front-to-back, the shroud has 270mm of space (including cables) with an advertised 223mm maximum PSU length. Good attention to detail means there’s an included velcro tie-down inside the power supply shroud, although less-good attention to detail means difficult to get access to once a power supply is installed. 

The X50 is nearly as wide as the original dual-chamber O11D (at 25.5cm versus 27cm), which leaves about 5.5cm between the motherboard tray and the side of the case for cable management. Typical mid-towers have around 2-3 cm of cable management clearance.

The hidden paths for fan cables are excellent. The bottom, front, and side mounts each have entrances into the molded plastic channels at the top and bottom of the case, although you may need to use some extensions if you want to route everything exclusively through those paths. The tie points around the edge of the motherboard tray aren't fancy, but they're effective in combination with the included velcro ties. Alternatively, some of the ties can be moved to the back of the case for bundling power and I/O cables, a feature that Fractal has been pushing for a few years now.

Continuing on cable management: Hyte says the silicone cable grommets are the single most expensive piece of the X50 by volume. These are giant, molded pieces in the style of the Y70. 

Grommets aren't included with the less expensive Air SKU, with the justification that they can't be seen through the side panel anyway.

Hyte also has a number of areas of smaller attention to detail in the case. The power button, for example, uses what appears to be a GTMX low profile switch, similar to a Cherry MX Blue keyboard switch. Using a keyboard switch here is 100% on-brand for HYTE, as is the fact that it requires four LEDs just to illuminate the circular white power button. The only downside is that the tactile click doesn't line-up with actuation, so you can click the button without turning your PC on.

The "paw" and "contemporary" foot styles are also unique. These are locked to specific colorways: so-called paws come with purple, pink, and green cases, and contemporary feet come with white, black, and red cases. These are not available as standalone accessories.

The X50's elaborate, rounded drive cage supports 2x 2.5" drives and 1x 3.5" drive simultaneously. The fact that the X50 can fit 2x 2.5" drives and a full-sized hard drive all stacked on top of each other behind the motherboard tray is a testament to the unusually large cable management area and the extra width of the case. Unfortunately, all three drives must be installed with plugs facing the rear of the case, so there's no tidy cable path from the power supply to the drive cage.

On packaging, there’s some cognitive dissonance on the environmental friendliness: We made a point of praising the BF 360 (read our review) for shipping screws in labeled reusable bags. Hyte also does this, except Hyte’s reusable bags contain smaller disposable bags, which is just totally unnecessary.

Thermals & Noise

Since the X50 doesn't come with fans, we gave it the HYTE HS 420 treatment by swapping in a set of fans from a competitive high-airflow case. According to HYTE, "optimal airflow for most configurations are going to involve 3 front intake fans with a single rear exhaust fan." This proved difficult: the Antec Flux Pro (read our review) has more than three 140mm fans, the BF 360 Flow (read our review) has 180mm fans, the Lancool 217 (read our review) has 170s, the Meshify 3 only has three fans total, the Montech XR Wood is from a different price class, and so on and so forth. The compromise we settled on was the Antec Flux non-Pro; although it's a much cheaper case, it comes with four 120mm fans and one 140mm, which all fit simultaneously into the X50. We placed the single 140mm fan in the front top slot as intake, two 120mm fans as intake in the other two front slots, another 120mm fan as intake in the side bottom slot, and the single reverse-blade 120mm fan as rear exhaust. The bottom slots were left empty.

The HAVN BF 360 is the head-to-head competitor for the X50 in some ways as they are both thermally targeted, followed by maybe the Antec C8 Curve (we have results for the C8 ARGB, which includes fans). Of the cases that HYTE chose to compare the X50 against in reviewer materials, we agree most with Fractal's Torrent (watch our review) and North XL (read our review) (and the NZXT H7 Flow 2024, but we don't have test data for that one). 

Acoustic Glass Testing

To start, we did some tests in the hemi-anechoic chamber with our microphone positioned one meter away from the case. 

Frequency Spectrum Comparison

An important note first: Our standardized acoustic testing for cases measures straight-on at the front panel, which we did take for our noise-normalized process and for which the X50 ran at around 44-45 dBA under those conditions. 

For the panel comparisons though, we’re shooting straight on at the side panels instead since glass on the side won’t affect front-facing noise much other than emitting more of it forward than a mesh panel.

For the frequency spectrum comparison, the laminated acoustic panel is nearly identical to the unlaminated panel. On a technicality, the laminated panel shifts some of its peaks slightly left on the frequency plot, such as at about 220-230 Hz, about 500 Hz, and about 900 Hz. They spike at the same points, but the laminated panel is very slightly lower frequency. It is hardly measurable and difficult to know if this is variance or not. We don’t think it’s variance, though.

The noise levels are the same: The laminated panel measured at 40.2 dBA and the unlaminated panel measured at 40.3 dBA. 0.1 dBA is absolutely within variance and error, and so these are effectively identical.

Adding the Mesh panel version to the charts, we see a 40.5 dBA result, so only slightly higher. The frequency shifts substantially though, despite only a 0.2 dBA increase in dBA SPL. The mesh panel has louder high frequencies on average, especially after the 1000 Hz marker. The range of 1,500 to 5,000 Hz in particular increases.

Also notably, the mesh panel sees a dip in noise levels for the frequencies in the range of 250 Hz to 500 Hz. The same spikes still exist, with the 230 Hz or so spike present but quieter, while the 450-500 Hz spike has shifted slightly right on the frequency axis.

We certainly believe that so-called “acoustic glass,” or laminated glass, can do something, but in this context, it seems like opportunistic marketing that retrofits itself into the actual purpose of the lamination, which is simply that the panel has to be made that way by the factory. 

It doesn't hurt, but the front of the case is mesh with a bunch of holes in it, and the side panel doesn't change that.

CPU Full Load Thermals - Noise-Normalized

For noise-normalized testing, we lower the speeds of all case fans until the total noise level measured at one meter in our hemi-anechoic chamber drops to 27 dBA SPL. This required very slightly different fan speeds for the X50 and X50 Air, but that’s exactly why we have this chamber. Room-level measurements would have had us at about the same noise level, which would slightly affect the results.

Adjusting for this, the CPU thermals in the two cases are identical at 43 degrees Celsius above ambient for all-core and 46-47 degrees for the P-cores. These results were gathered with the Antec Flux's stock fans.

The BF 360 had a strong showing in our recent review, and it's ahead of the X50 here with a significant lead from its 41-degree all-core average. The once-king Torrent is basically tied with the X50, as is the mesh-sided North XL. Appropriately, the Antec Flux is only a little warmer than the X50 (using exactly the same fans) at 44 degrees, tied with the glass-sided North XL. Other than margin of error, the other differences would emerge from the case design. 

The Antec C8 with its bottom intake averages significantly worse for CPU thermals at 50 degrees.

GPU Full Load Thermals - Noise-Normalized

In the same test, the X50 and X50 Air are more differentiated when considering GPU thermals. The X50 averages 44 degrees Celsius above ambient on the GPU and the X50 Air averages 42, which is a relatively large gap for GPU thermal testing in our suite, especially for the same frame and fans. 

This makes sense, since the mesh panel gives the GPU external access to air and its exhaust from the top of the video card can also easily exit the side panel.

The BF 360's performance is strong in this test at 42.5 degrees, as is the C8 ARGB due to the bottom intake, but the X50 Air ties both for GPU thermals. The Torrent remains best on the chart with a 40 degree average, while the better of the two North XL results ties the X50 non-Air, and the Flux falls behind at 46 degrees. 

CPU Full Load Thermals - Full Speed

Moving to tests with the case fans at max speed, the best CPU temperature average was scored with the front bracket in the 0mm offset position, with a 36 degree all-core average and 39 on the P-cores. That's followed by the regular X50 at 37 degrees all-core, and then finally the X50 Air at 39 degrees all-core. For CPU thermals, it makes sense that the glass panel would help as it ensures all intake makes it to the CPU (rather than having some of it escape out of the side panel prior to hitting the cooler). 

This is getting complicated, so we'll focus on the regular X50 for comparison here. The BF 360 Flow ended up at 40.5 degrees for P-core thermals when running at 44 dBA, with the X50 at the same noise level -- so we’re basically noise-normalized again -- and tying it. The X50 Air falls behind here at 42.8 degrees since we’re losing CPU-bound air through the side panel.

The Torrent's 42-degree average at 42.3 dBA is still respectable, but the flood of high airflow cases in recent years has pushed it down the chart, where it sits alongside the Antec Flux. The Flux being at 41.9 dBA and 42.7 degrees shows that its case kills more of the noise than HYTE’s X50 (which is about 3 dBA louder) since they have the same fans here, though the X50 gets more air into the case. 

The C8's CPU thermals continue to be relatively weak with a 46 degree all-core average, although that's accompanied by a relatively quiet 37.1 dBA noise reading.

GPU Full Load Thermals - Full Speed

GPU thermals aren't significantly affected by the change in side panel between X50 and X50 Air, with both averaging between 42 and 43 degrees above ambient for GPU temperature. This is a reversal of the behavior we saw in noise-normalized testing, so there's value to considering both. With a 0mm offset on the front bracket, that average rises to 44 degrees, so it's not an upgrade across the board.

The stock BF 360 Flow averages 40 degrees, which beats the best of the X50's results. Overall, the BF 360 has either tied or beaten the X50 in this test. This obviously depends on what fans are installed in the X50 and where, but we were fairly generous to the X50 by installing five total fans from the Flux (non-Pro).

CPU Full Load Thermals - Standardized Fans

As usual with cases that don't ship with any fans, our standardized fan testing assumes greater importance. Of our standard set of three Noctua fans, we installed the 2x 140mm fans as front intake and the 1x 120mm as rear exhaust, which comes close to the 3x intake/1x exhaust configuration that HYTE considers optimal.

With the 2x 140mm fans positioned in the middle of the front panel, the X50 and X50 Air performed identically, at 41 degrees all-core and about 44 on the P-cores. Shifting the fans down to the lowest front slots in the X50 slightly lowered CPU temperatures.

The BF 360 non-Flow comes without fans, so this test is perfect for comparing that variant against the X50. Using the same set of fans, the BF 360 averaged 41 degrees all-core and 45 on the P-cores, which ties it with the X50 when the standardized fans are positioned in the middle, but the X50 pulls ahead a little with the lower fan placement. 

For context, when we performed this test in the BF 360, the intake fans were positioned as low as possible on the front panel to point directly into the airflow scoop. 

Generally, this test indicates that the CPU cooling performance is equal between the BF 360 and X50 with our setup.

GPU Full Load Thermals - Standardized Fans

Moving to GPU thermals with the standardized fans, the X50 and X50 Air with the front fans in the middle position again performed identically at 47 degrees above ambient, and the lower position was again better at 46 degrees.

The BF 360 had particularly good performance here, likely due to the airflow scoop, averaging 41 degrees above ambient. Combined with the CPU cooling results, this puts the BF 360 ahead of the X50 when using the same set of fans.

Schlieren Imaging Air Density Test

This Schlieren imaging air density test example shows the case without any side panel installed at all. You're just seeing the true chaos of air entering and exiting through a wide open side panel where there's no particular direction of flow. 

Adding the glass panel has the expected effect. The only air density gradient we see now is from air exiting the back of the case and floating around near the mirror. There's not much movement here, as expected, because air can't penetrate glass. 

Swapping the panel to mesh instead, we see something pretty cool. The gradient change is most visible exactly where the GPU's exhaust is. It's spewing air out of the mesh from the GPU, allowing it to exit the case more easily. And you can also see it going pretty far away from the case, which is a good thing. This has some benefits, but because the glass had provided a sort of railroaded path for intake to hit the CPU tower, it also has some downsides. We can also see, for example, towards the bottom that some air is exiting before ever hitting the GPU or the CPU tower, meaning that air is taken in from the front bottom position and effectively lost without doing anything actually useful in this configuration. 

In this shot, you can see how the air, or specifically the air density gradient, although still chaotic on exit, takes a relatively straight path out of the louvered vents. 

The vents nearest the blade tip of the fan show this the most where we can actually see how the air deflects around the vent punch out. That's the white sort of tip around the edge of that. 

This shot shows us the vents as well where we get straight clear paths and gradient density changes prominently seen right at the vent tip. Once again, the air density differences show the air naturally finding itself going up as we'd expect. It’s pretty cool to visualize this stuff, especially that mesh side panel and what it's doing. 

Conclusion

The HYTE X50 overall has sturdy build quality and creative design elements, but it also has creative marketing. 

Sometimes, like with the louvered vents, the marketed feature actually does something.

Other times, like with the so-called “acoustic glass,” it’s not something we’re able to quantify in our testing.

The challenge with testing came down to fans, since the X50 doesn’t include any. By using the Antec Flux fans, we were able to see that it’s generally at least better than the Antec Flux. The standardized fan test is also overall favorable for the X50. To be very clear, there’s an Antec Flux Pro model as well, and that one sorts out differently as it has six fans including 140mm ones. 

As we mentioned in our BF 360 review, HAVN is HYTE's biggest competition for this release: the fanless BF 360 costs $160, just like the X50 (in the US). HYTE is well positioned, though, because if you want a case that looks like the X50, there isn't any competition from anyone. Until GameMAX and Gamdias rip it off like they do with everything else. The BF 360 Flow wins in terms of thermals, it optionally comes with stock fans, and it has all the other benefits of build quality and ease of use that we mentioned in our review, but it's a more conservative design and only available in black and white.

We like the X50 and we're comfortable adding it to our list of recommendations alongside the BF 360. As usual, we have yet to see other manufacturers beat Lian Li's price-to-performance with the Lancool 217 at $120 and 207 at $90. But that's not the market HYTE is aiming for. If the colorful design of the X50 is more appealing than its thermal performance, the best alternatives we can give are Thermaltake's Tower 600, Ceres 350, and View 600, although we haven't reviewed those models.

As for the rest of the market at the crowded $200 price point (factoring in the cost of fans), even with the higher US prices, the X50 compares favorably to established cases like the C8 Curve, Torrent, and North XL. It does so by combining high airflow with competent cable management and a quality of design that goes deeper than the outside of the case. It's not that the X50 is inherently better than the North XL, for example, but it can match performance in a way that makes it a valid alternative without sacrificing functionality. That applies to the cases we brought up for comparison to the BF 360, as well. Cases like the Meshify 3 Ambience Pro RGB (read our review), Frame 5000D, and Flux Pro.

The key factor is the way the X50 looks. The painful back-and-forth with HYTE's factories to get a working process for creating the curved front panels and louvred vents paid off, and it has put HYTE ahead of its rivals. 

The glass lamination doesn't really matter unless you smash your case, but the big curved panel is impressive even ignoring that, and we actually prefer the glass X50 to the X50 Air. The X50 Air isn't equipped to take advantage of its mesh side panel, so with most setups there's no reason to expect a difference in thermal performance between the models. In our opinion, the curved glass and variety of colors available with the normal X50 make it worth the $30 upcharge. 

We can't think of many case companies that have been offering this kind of variety other than Thermaltake, and maybe Montech or Geometric Future. We look forward to HYTE expanding the X-series lineup in the same way as the Y-series, hopefully with more sizes and design collaborations.

We analyze the HAVN BF 360 Flow’s thermal performance across a variety of scenarios, examine its fan flow performance, and bring smoke testing back

The Highlights

• The HAVN BF 360 follows-up the company's HS 420 that we previously reviewed and feels like a direct competitor to the Fractal Torrent
• The company misspelled recommended as “recommendned” within the case
• The HAVN BF 360 Flow is a high airflow, mesh-fronted case that charges a premium for its looks and build quality
• Original MSRP: $160 - $190
• Release Date: October 2025

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

Intro

Today we're covering the BF 360, the second-ever case from HAVN, with two massive 40mm thick intake fans and a 30mm exhaust fan. This case feels like the first real follow-up to the Fractal Torrent’s (watch our review) impressive airflow.

Editor's note: This was originally published on October 25, 2025 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

Credits

Test Lead, Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Testing, Writing

Patrick Lathan

Camera, Video Editing

Vitalii Makhnovets

Video Editing

Tim Phetdara

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

The BF 360 has big toilet-bowl airflow scoop, a plate that claims to prevent recirculation (which we tested), HAVN's overkill dedication to rubber accents on every single contact point, excellent cable paths, and it even has “recommendned” cable routing. 

That’s right. They recommendned it so much that the recommendnednation is repeated across the entire back of the chassis. 

HAVN can finally join other manufacturers for their typos, like Gunnir’s “Unkonw.”

This is also the first case we've reviewed with a stone-style front panel, and we're ready for that change after two straight years of wood accents -- not that those have been bad, they’ve just been plentiful.

The HAVN BF 360 is $160 without fans and $190 with the 3 custom fans included.

Overview

HAVN entered the market last year with the HS 420 (read our review), a brand-new concept from an experienced group of designers. 

The 420 had a lot of thought put into its airflow paths in particular, and its mechanical design, but it was still a glass-fronted case that shipped without fans. The HS 420 falls more into the pricier showcase category (alongside the HYTE Y70 (read our review) and Lian Li's O11 family) than the high-airflow category. Now, HAVN is back with the BF 360, a smaller and less expensive model with a fans-included Flow variant, directly targeting the high-airflow champions like the Fractal Torrent and Lian Li's Lancool cases.

We still have plenty of praise for HAVN's attention to detail, but we've got a couple of notes to elaborate on later: first, HAVN didn't communicate a minor difference between the case fans and individually-purchased ones. 

Second, we identified a mistake on the active preorder page that said two fan hubs came with each case, which was wrong. It comes with one. After we noticed that, HAVN fixed it. 

The BF 360 is available in black or white, with the Flow listed at $190 and the non-Flow (without fans) at $160. Purchased separately, the Flow's two H 18 fans and single H 14 would total $70.

Specs (for Flow variant)

Specs copied from manufacturer materials, please read review for our own measurements and opinions

The Build

Let’s get into the build.

Like the HS 420, the BF 360 has hard plastic cable channels that have been labeled with their "recommendned" uses and built-in velcro. HAVN probably wishes it had used stickers for those labels (like it did in the HS 420), but at least this will make TRYX feel better about the "discovered an unknow" typo. 

The predefined cable paths may come across as restrictive, but we have a hard time imagining a scenario where we'd want to route cables anywhere except the locations that HAVN chose. SATA power and data cables are the only ones that don't have a clear destination.

We saw alternative front panel prototypes when visiting HAVN earlier this year, including a wooden one, but we're happy that HAVN steered away from the Fractal look and chose a less common stone-like pattern. They’ve beaten Cooler Master to the punch on this as well. The speckled plastic finish reminds us of an old keyboard. On that subject, all of the case fans are black in the black model, while in the white model the front fans are black and the rear fan is white. We think this is an intentional choice to hide the front fans, but it's something to be aware of if you want to color-coordinate your build.

The whole front panel assembly hooks into the case toollessly and is held in place with magnets, similar to the Fractal Torrent. The BF 360's front filter layer can't be separated for deep-cleaning as easily as it can be in the Torrent, but the stone-textured layer can be removed with six screws.

Inside the case, there’s a scoop. We've been calling these airflow scoops "toilet bowl" designs even though the NZXT H5 Flow is the only one that really looks like that. We've also seen examples from Fractal and Corsair, but unlike each of those, the "air guide ramp" at the front of the BF 360's PSU shroud is made of metal and is permanently attached with rivets. It’s also relatively flat, which HAVN’s thermal engineer says tested the best in their A/B testing. Usually scoops like this are removable for radiator compatibility reasons. The Flow doesn't claim any front radiator compatibility in the first place. When planning a build in the non-Flow, keep in mind that the front edge of the scoop is 8cm back from the front fan bracket, although that's plenty of room for conventional radiator and fan combos.

To match the scoop, there's an "Anti-Backflow Plate" that blanks out the part of the top fan mount above the 180mm front fans. "Backflow" in this case would mean air flowing out of the case through the gap and recirculating into the front fans, reducing their cooling effectiveness.

The GPU support arm in the BF 360 doesn't match the quality of the case's design. The HS 420's support is sturdy and braces against the PSU shroud, while the BF 360's is less reinforced and relies solely on friction with the rubber cable grommet to keep from sliding down. Moving to two points of contact with the GPU is a good idea for an upgrade, but in practice it means that one point will always be looser than the other. The most positive change is that the new design can provide support to about ~35cm down the length of a GPU, whereas the HS 420's support can only reach ~28cm.

For packaging, HAVN arranged the styrofoam inserts so that they don't catch on the punched-in handles of the outer box, which is surprisingly rare. It’s not a big deal, but when you unpack multiple cases every month for years on end, you start to notice these things. HAVN also uses labeled ziploc bags for its screws, which helps reduce waste (versus single-use bags) while keeping screw types separate.

On one of the two review samples we were sent, the front I/O wasn't lined up correctly with the cutouts on the surface of the case, making the USB Type-C port inaccessible. This is the first fit-and-finish problem we've seen from HAVN. Fortunately, we were able to fix it ourselves, but this shouldn’t happen on a nearly $200 case.

HAVN's H Series fans have a few features worth calling out. First, the unusual shape of the hub was supposedly intentionally designed to "guide air towards the fan blade for smoother flow pattern," while the fan blades themselves have a sawtooth pattern that we've seen many times in the past from companies like Fractal and EK. The fans are 40mm thick, which gives extra length to the fluid dynamic bearings, which HAVN claims increases durability and stability. The fan frames are molded so that cables can be threaded through the corners, which is a nice way to reduce cable clutter without committing to something like Lian Li's UNI FAN system, and the rear fan's cable is routed through a special hidden channel at the top of the case. Retail H-series fans include the "Loopin™ Cable System" with daisy-chainable male and female connectors on each fan, but after we identified a potential error in the documentation, HAVN clarified that the ones shipped with the BF 360 Flow all have regular old 4-pin connectors.

We're not sure how to feel about the trays for storage drives. They look like a nightmare to manufacture, with rubber grommets, rivets, studs, and a removable inner piece, but the end result is a completely normal drive capacity: four total 2.5" drives, or two total 3.5" drives. The two trays are mounted in the cable management area by default, but there's actually a third mounting location behind the motherboard tray that may be preferable if you want to free up room for cables.

HAVN has remained committed to putting rubber damping on every single point where two movable metal surfaces would contact, and this extends to the drive bays, which is the single area in the HS 420 where we noted a lack of rubber. There are also textured grips inside the handles on the side panels. They don't do much functionally, but from a UX perspective they indicate where to pull on the panels and in what direction.

As for radiators, the top radiator tray is the entire roof of the case, so removing two screws and sliding the tray off gives unrestricted access to the interior. The only downside we noticed is that if you mount HAVN's extra-thick 180mm fans to this tray, they'll obstruct the cutouts along the top edge of the motherboard, and CPU power cables may come close to the fan blades. HAVN's claims for radiator support are extremely conservative, with the Flow only officially supporting radiators in the top of the case, and only up to 360mm.

The front and top panels are held on with magnets, but all panels have additional screws to secure them during shipping. The glass side panel is beveled on each corner, and the plastic gutter that it seats in is shaped to match. Both side panels have metal studs on the top edge (in addition to the usual snaps) to make sure nothing sags out of alignment, which is similar to the strategy TRYX used for its L70 (read our review) update.

HAVN BF 360 Flow Thermals

Other than the normal suite, we've selected three alternate configurations for testing: one with the anti-backflow plate removed, one with two additional H 18 (180mm) fans added as top exhaust, and finally another test with the additional 180mm fans but with one as intake and one as exhaust. According to HAVN (and our own experience), top intake in front of the CPU cooler and top exhaust behind it should help to avoid stealing air from the cooler.

The scoop in the BF 360 isn't removable, so we tested it as-is, but we've done experiments in the past with removing or taping off airflow scoops at the front of PSU shrouds. If you're interested, you can see the most recent results in our Meshify 3 review.

HAVN's own HS 420 is an obvious comparison to make, but they don't sell a version of that case with fans included (yet), so our thermal results come with a caveat that they aren't truly "stock." HYTE competes closely with HAVN as a company, but we can't make thermal comparisons against the recently-launched X50 ($160 without fans) until our review is finalized. We'll judge against HYTE's $180 Y60 instead, but the Y60 isn't a high airflow case.

As for comparisons that we feel good about, Fractal's Torrent and the much newer Meshify 3 are on the list. Lian Li's Lancool 217 is there as well. The top-tier Meshify 3 Ambience Pro RGB has dropped to a competitive $180 on Amazon, while Lian Li continues to offer brutally low prices with the 217 at $122-$125.

CPU Full Load Thermals - Full Speed

Before we get to noise-normalized testing, let’s start with full speed testing to better evaluate alternate case configurations at full speed. 

Noise-normalized testing is better for comparing different case models, but running the fans at full speed makes it easier to compare configurations of a single case. With the fans at full blast, the BF 360 Flow averaged 37 degrees above ambient for the all-core CPU temperature and 41 degrees for the P-cores alone while at 44.5 dBA from 1 meter in our chamber. Removing the anti-backflow plate caused the CPU temperature to rise by just over one degree, so it seems like HAVN was right to include it. It works. 

Adding two 180mm exhaust fans to the top of the case made CPU temperatures worse, which is an expected result that we have continually re-proven for about 12 years now. This is because the top-front exhaust fan steals air from the CPU cooler before it ever hits it, so it’s a relatively simple concept. Overall, the change wasn't significant. On the other hand, flipping the frontmost 180mm fan to intake also reinforced findings from our previous test bench iteration, resulting in the lowest averages we've recorded in this test. The results dropped down to 35 degrees all-core and 38 on the P-cores. These are excellent results, although this was with adding two extra 180mm fans, so adding similar fans to other cases would likely give the BF 360 some company. If you want to go crazy on airflow, doing this 4x 180 configuration might be a fun way to do it.

The stock BF 360 Flow tied the Lancool 217 (read our review) (at the same dBA) for CPU thermals, making it the best on this chart other than the Lancool 216 (read our review) (at 42 dBA). Peak performance of the thick H 18 intake fans is high, allowing the BF 360 to surpass the Torrent and Meshify 3's 39 degree all-core average. Like the Torrent and 217, though, the BF 360 is noisy at max speed, registering 44.5 dBA.

GPU Full Load Thermals - Full Speed

The stock BF 360 Flow averaged 40 degrees for GPU thermals and 44 on the VRAM, which was completely unaffected by the backflow plate. That makes sense since the plate is at the top of the case. Adding the two 180mm fans as pure exhaust to the top of the case aligned with the GPU's flow-through cooler and brought down the average to 39 degrees, while the mixed intake-exhaust configuration raised the GPU's average to 42 degrees. This is why it’s important to consider more than one temperature during configuration: This was better for CPU thermals, but is worse for the more sensitive GPU where you can get slight boosting benefits from a few degrees.

With a flow-through GPU cooler pushing hot air up towards the roof of the case, the best compromise may be to leave the stock configuration alone and stick to front intake, rear exhaust.

The 217 is tied with the BF 360 here, just like it was for CPU thermals, and the Meshify 3's relative placement is also the same at one degree warmer than the BF 360. Meanwhile, the Torrent is slightly cooler at 39 degrees. 

CPU Full Load Thermals - Noise Normalized

Noise-normalized thermals are next.

For these tests, we place the case in our hemi-anechoic noise chamber and lower case fan speeds in tandem until the overall noise level hits our desired 27 dBA SPL threshold. The BF 360's large intake fans and unique fan hubs should help it in noise-normalized testing.

The BF 360 Flow is in excellent company here, with an average all-core CPU temperature at 41 degrees Celsius above ambient and P-cores at 45 above ambient. That matches the Lancool 217's performance almost exactly (whether the 217 is in CPU or GPU mode), and although the Meshify 3 Ambience Pro RGB was cooler, it's within our rough one degree margin for error. The Torrent is similarly close in the other direction, with the BF 360 coming out ahead. The HS 420 result shown here is tied with the Torrent, but that's with the 420 using the Antec Flux Pro's stock fans since it didn’t ship with any. That’s 6 fans in the HS 420 for that test. The Y60's stock performance is on the complete opposite end of the chart at 53 degrees all-core, but again, the Y60 isn't an airflow-focused case.

The Flux Pro (read our review) ends up about the same as the BF 360 as well, so overall, the BF 360 is one of the most competitive cases on the chart and is more or less within re-run variance of the best cases. It is functionally tied for the best.

GPU Full Load Thermals - Noise Normalized

The BF 360's noise-normalized GPU temperatures in the same test were also very good, at 43 degrees above ambient and 47 for the VRAM. The Torrent keeps the crown here with its 40 degree average, which is a meaningful improvement over the BF360. The BF 360 falls within one degree of the Lancool 217's GPU mode result, and it almost exactly matches the Meshify 3's average. As with CPU thermals, the HS 420 is one degree warmer than the BF 360 (using Antec's fans). That’s a good result for the BF 360 considering the configuration we had the HS420 in.

The stock fans are biased low so that the lower intake fan points into the airflow scoop, which shows an intentional focus on GPU thermals. Overall, the BF 360 keeps pace with its competitors, but it's worth keeping in mind that the 217 in particular is significantly cheaper.

HAVN’s BF 360 does well overall here and is in the top set of results, but didn’t top the charts like we’d hoped based on its fan configuration, but it’s at least in good company.

VRM & RAM Full Load Thermals - Full Speed

The configuration with one top intake and one top exhaust was the best for VRM thermals, with a chart-topping average of 18 degrees above ambient. It was also by far the best for DRAM thermals, with a single-digit 9 degree average. It makes sense: the intake fan pushing cool air directly into the memory and the exhaust fan pulling hot air directly out of the VRM heatsinks is the ideal scenario for those particular hotspots.

HAVN BF 360 Flow Smoke Flow Testing

Smoke testing is challenging and poses problems. We’ve been experimenting with this for over a decade now, and the first time we tried it, we used plumbing smoke pellets. It worked great for visualizing airflow, but it filled the area with carcinogenic smoke.

For this round, we’re using a fog machine instead. The fog is safer, but it comes with a tradeoff: residue. Fog oil coats everything it touches, leaving a thin, greasy film on all the components. The system will still run fine electrically, but it’s gross and isn’t something you want on your main test hardware. Because of that, we’re using a different PC for smoke testing instead of one of our benchmark systems.

The next problem is how you get the fog into the case. The common approach is to point a nozzle at the front intake and spray smoke in, but that’s a bad idea. As soon as you add velocity and essentially turn the fog into a mini air jet, you’re changing how the case actually breathes. Wherever you aim that nozzle, you’re forcing the smoke in unnaturally, which tampers with results. 

Ideally, you’d have the PC surrounded by an even cloud of fog so that it can pull in air naturally. That’s the only way to see what’s really happening with positive or negative pressure inside the chassis. 

About ten years ago, we built a homemade smoke chamber out of cardboard, tape, and Saran Wrap. It actually worked well, but it took five hours to set up every time.

This new setup is a streamlined version of that old idea. We’ve built a semi-sealed box, which we put in front of the PC. It’s not perfectly airtight, but it’s close enough. From there, we fill it with fog from the top. The case is then left to pull in air on its own when we remove the panel, with minimal interference from us. That way, we’re not skewing the results by blasting smoke at specific points.

As for the fog itself, it’s not ideal, but it’s the best middle ground. The oil residue is annoying, but it’s far better than from plumbing pellets. We’re using parts we don’t mind getting a little messy and it’s still representative of our test system.

It’s an early iteration of the setup, but we’re already planning upgrades, like better seals and gaskets for the fog hose to make it more consistent.

This approach gives us a realistic, repeatable way to visualize case airflow without interfering with it.

The front-top fan appears to spray wide, with the top of the inlet arcing air up toward the top of the case.

We can see air from the top half of that bottom fan entering the case and immediately going through the flow-through fan. Beneath it, the rest of the air hits the scoop, and that air makes it through to the left-most GPU fan, which will enable cooling into the GPU. Some air exits straight out of the case via the PCIe slots, so we're not getting the negative pressure effect where air is fed in through the back, as we saw with the old NZXT case.

Meanwhile, the air going through the flow-through area is deflecting the top intake air up and away from the CPU cooler. This matches our testing during the 30-series of NVIDIA’s flow-through coolers. The CPU cooler ends up a little warmer as a result, and so does the CPU temperature, but this is the nature of flow-through coolers and not of the case itself. CPUs are low enough power compared to GPUs that they can typically handle it without meaningful change. As a result of the GPU's giant flow-through area, the case intake is being deflected up and toward the roof of the case. This is why GPU temperature goes up with a top-front intake fan, but CPU temperature goes down.

We also noticed a slight recirculation pattern in the top front. This isn't a problem since it's eventually finding its way out, but this is a good further defense for why the back-flow plate is present. This air would be exiting the case and re-entering the fan without that plate, and it'd have been warmed in the process.

It's not perfect, but people have wanted us to bring these back for years now, so we did our best to resolve our hangups with it with this quick mock-up. We have more we can add later.

Fan Performance Testing

We also ran some quick fan tests on the fan machine. We’re slowly starting to roll this data out. As we talked about in February this year, we’re just going to have to accept that we need to begin building a data set and it won’t be everything we want all at once. This will also be redone and improved upon over time. We want to caution you that we are inexperienced in both presenting and collecting this data, and so it does not have our same high confidence as other data we collect. Although we think the data is accurate, there is a higher chance of an inaccuracy. These charts will be marked as experimental for that reason. 

We’re just comparing two fans here today and without their cases. The point of this test right now is to better put data to the thermal results of the BF 360 vs. the Fractal Torrent, since they’re close competitors on the charts.

The first test shows the maximum CFM on the machine. At full speed and max CFM, the BF 360 fan reached 169 CFM. This was at 1279 RPM. The Fractal Torrent Dynamic X2 fan hit 141 CFM with its 1187 RPM, so slightly slower, but a somewhat large gap in flow performance. The Torrent fan is older and a couple millimeters thinner.

Looking back at the full speed case chart, with all factors including case design considered, the BF 360’s 41-degree P-core average had it ahead of the Torrent by about 2 degrees. A lot of that is attributable to the fan here rather than just the case design.

Looking back to the fan chart: We also took case noise-normalized numbers. This means that we ran the fans at their speed we ran them in our noise-normalized case test; in other words, the fan is not noise-matched standalone, because we didn’t test it that way thermally. Matching the case conditions gives us better insight as to differences between the case results.

When running at noise-normalized case levels, we measured 85 CFM on the HAVN BF 360 and 72 CFM on the Torrent. The BF 360 fan is testing better in our initial tests here. 

The noise-normalized CPU numbers for the cases had the BF 360 at 45 degrees to the Torrent’s 46.

We had some pressure numbers as well, which we’re only presenting at full speed. This is just because we’re still studying how we want to present the rest of it. But for the full speed results, the Fractal Torrent had a 2.31 mm H2O for pressure performance. And the Haven BF360 was at 2.87. That is for the maximum mm H2O at full speed, which would mean the minimum flow in that test.

Anyway, we have a lot more to do here, but the simple matter is that we can’t figure out what that is without just starting to build a data set, so that’s what we’re doing. This is a very rudimentary start for you all. It’s easy to forget our other testing has years of experience and collection behind it, so we’ll get there eventually with this.

HAVN BF 360 Flow Conclusion

The $180-$200 range where the BF 360 Flow lands has become the most crowded segment over the past several months of our case reviews: currently the Antec Flux Pro is $180, the Corsair 5000D RS ARGB is $200, the Meshify 3 Ambience Pro RGB is $180 depending on sales and availability, and the MasterFrame 500 Mesh we just reviewed is… $150, despite launching at $190.

Of those, the Meshify 3 in particular falls into the same category as the BF 360, in the sense that it's a high airflow mesh-fronted case that charges a premium for looks and build quality. Fractal has the advantage of cheaper Meshify 3 case SKUs that still come with fans, although we found the ring of LED lighting in the Ambience Pro RGB to be a big part of that case's appeal. Fractal also still sells the Torrent, which bears clear similarities to the BF 360 with its two extra-large 180mm intake fans and excellent thermal performance. 

Cable management is better in the BF 360 than the Torrent, but you can't go wrong choosing between the two, although it does sting to pay more than the original $190 MSRP for the Torrent when the case is more than four years old.

Alongside Fractal, HYTE is the major competitor for HAVN, but the HYTE cases that we've reviewed don't make sense as alternatives to the BF 360 Flow. 

You may want to wait for our upcoming HYTE X50/X50 Air review, since those cases are more focused on thermal performance in a way that the HYTE Y-series (currently) isn't. Neither of the X50 variants come with stock fans, but the X50 non-Air is priced at $160, which matches the fanless BF 360.

In terms of raw performance per dollar, Lian Li still has things locked down. 

There are other factors that matter when purchasing a case, but if all you care about is minmaxing, the Lancool cases are nearly impossible to beat. The older 216 was more similar to the BF 360 Flow with its two wide-framed 160mm intake fans, but this year's Lancool 217 performs just as well, and it's still readily available at its launch MSRP of $120. Although it's not quite in the same category, we also have to mention that the Lancool 207 is priced insanely low at $83-$90 while easily keeping up with the BF 360's thermal performance.

Given the HS 420's price increase to $230 (minimum) and the fact that it doesn't come with fans, HAVN has successfully avoided competing with itself. The BF 360 is exactly what we wanted after reviewing the HS 420. The 420 is big, it's got a lot of glass, it doesn't come with any fans, and it's over $200 (although the price makes sense for what it is). The release of the HS 420 left an opening for a smaller, less expensive, more airflow-focused case, which is the BF 360. 

The build quality is high, the thermal performance is extremely good, and although the Lancool 217 and other Lian Li models may have more favorable dollars-to-performance ratio in a strict sense, the BF 360's visual appeal and overall refinement make up the difference. Other than the “recommendned” cable paths, of course.

Cooler Master’s MF500 case has overall high build quality with good materials and sturdy panel, although it does have its downsides and areas we're critical of

The Highlights

• The MF in Cooler Master MF500 stands for Master Frame, which continues Cooler Master's redundant naming
• The case has middling thermal performance
• Cooler Master is back on its A-game with the MF500 series of cases
• Original MSRP: $150-$190
• Release Date: October 2025

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

Intro

We saw this case getting made recently. As in this literal, exact case.

Editor's note: This was originally published on October 15, 2025 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

Credits

Test Lead, Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Testing, Writing

Patrick Lathan

Camera, Video Editing

Vitalii Makhnovets

Video Editing

Tim Phetdara

Camera

Andrew Coleman

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

It was assembled in front of us on this assembly line when we toured the factory in China. 

While we were there, we asked Cooler Master if we could pick one from the line and then sign across the packing seals and panels to make absolutely certain it wasn’t tampered with.

That’s kind of cool. Maybe this will kickstart the new way to ensure no review sample tampering. It’s kind of high effort and Cooler Master thought we were joking when we first pitched going to their factory to hand-pick a review unit, but they agreed.

This case is interesting: It’s designed with a lot of mechanical freedom in mind for the user, meaning support for nearly any fan size up to 200mm.

Using its rails system with 1cm spacing. It also has support to invert the case, keep standard orientation but move the power supply to the top, flip the I/O to the top of the case, and use the 1cm-spaced holes for a variety of rails, tabs, fans, and cages. The case is built of sturdy, high-quality aluminum and steel components everywhere. 

It’s assembled of just corners and columns, which allows modularity; although, it was a letdown that the chassis itself is riveted together at the corners in a way that’s restrictive. The build quality is excellent and, although (like any case) it falls short in some areas, we like where this case series is going.

The MasterFrame had a disappointing launch in 2021 with the MasterFrame 700. This one is better. 

It’s built from modular parts like an Erector Set (or Meccano if you're British or don't like saying the word “Erector”), and they're intended to be extremely reconfigurable as part of the "FreeForm 2.0" project. The MasterFrame 500 is $150 on Amazon right now, though it does change price a lot. We saw it change price 3 times in one month and ranged from $150 to $190, which is a wide range. 

MasterFrame 500 Mesh Specs

Specs copied from manufacturer materials, please read review for our own measurements and opinions

The Build

As it ships, the MF500 Mesh has 2x 200mm front intake fans and 1x 120mm rear exhaust. Cooler Master has had both some of the most successful and some of the worst implementations of 200mm fans, but in recent years, all of their 200mm fan solutions we’ve tested have passed testing. These fans work great if they’re unobstructed: They don’t have much static pressure performance, but do well with open flow while maintaining lower noise levels.

Other than the size of the front fans, it's a fully conventional layout: the PSU shroud is at the bottom, there’s a normal motherboard orientation, and it has typical airflow paths. 

The manual describes two main alternate configurations, which are moving the PSU to the top of the case and inverting the case. 

There are smaller items that can be moved around, like the front I/O and the drive mount, but those are the most transformative options. Cooler Master’s future expansion on this series hopes to add even more modularity, but we don’t review future promises. We review what’s actually shipping. 

The current DIY-style MasterFrame cases feel closer to the QUBE 500 Flatpack than they do to the MasterFrame 700. 

And that’s good, because the MasterFrame 700 sort of sucked.

Unlike the Flatpack, though, the MF 500 ships preassembled, and the pillars and corners that make up the "Exo-Structure" of the case are riveted, which may come as a surprise if you've been following the marketing. 

Cooler Master informed us that its short-term goal is to work with partners to manufacture cases in dimensions that the partners want, and the mid-term goal is to allow end users themselves to order custom case dimensions directly from Cooler Master. This is doable since it’s all just aluminum rods and corners. Long-term, it's possible that Cooler Master will sell Exo-Structure pieces for home assembly, but we were told it depends on cost. 

Currently, the amount of rivets means even replacing them with screws would make it a nightmare -- something we witnessed first-hand when we saw a hand-assembled model get taken apart at Computex over the span of 10-20 minutes.

But the ambitions are good and we see a clear pathway to making this happen. Cooler Master wants to eventually take custom orders to assemble in its new California-based facility.

The MF 500 also reminds us of the old CaseLabs designs, which had a similar ring of holes around the perimeter. For a case with a modular DIY focus, starting with a CaseLabs comparison is a good sign for Cooler Master. 

Case reconfiguration can take a while if you take the James May approach.

The manual describes a 17-step process for moving the PSU to the top of the case, and then a further 10 steps for inverting the whole case, not including the optional 7 steps for inverting the front I/O. It's not as bad as the Dark Base Pro 900 (read our review), but unbuilding the system, inverting the case for the first time, rebuilding, and then running tests took most of a work day. 

It would have sped things up a little if the case didn't use a mix of M4 and 6-32 screws that look similar at a glance. It would have also sped things up if we took the Jeremy Clarkson approach. 

One of the major upsides of the case design is that fan mounting options are flexible.

Fans can either be centered by using tabs that attach to the edges of the case, or installed off-center using a long rail. The rails are sized to fit the sides/bottom/top and the tabs fit the front/bottom/top. We would have liked a couple of extra tabs to work with. Cooler Master lists compatibility with 120, 140, 180, and 200mm fans, but because the holes along the case perimeter are spaced 1cm apart, the rails in particular are compatible with any fan size under 200mm. 

This is pretty cool and means, if you wanted, you could throw a weird size like a 150mm or 160mm fan in there.

The various case elements are made from surprisingly thick metal; for example, the tabs are 2mm thick and the long rails are 3mm thick.

The result of that is a high build quality with good rigidity of the structure. This case isn’t flimsy.

Support for 3.5" and even 2.5" drives is starting to wane, but we were surprised to see that such a modular case offers exactly one drive mount. Two metal "multi-function bars" are included in the accessory kit, and these can be used to either mount one fan, one SSD, OR one HDD. 

Cooler Master might sell extras, and it's likely someone will come up with a 3D-printed alternative, but the case would have more DIY cred if it included just two more of the basic steel strips. The case is set up perfectly to support more drives with its rail system and it just doesn’t.

As the sticker on the case and instructions in the manual state, panel removal is TOOL FREE. Cooler Master has made a compromise here; the panels don't screw down, but the magnets that hold them on are extremely strong to compensate. There are also no obvious handles on the panels, so you may actually find it easier to pry the panels off with a tool. This is better than cases without a securing screw and an easily removed panel, but it’d still be nice to have a screw point to secure the glass.

Another point that could use work is the cable management space.

This is one of those cases where you have to remember to route cables under supports or else the side panel can't close. The cutouts that the power cables must be routed through aren't all lined up with each other, either, so it takes some indirect routing. The motherboard tray is structured so that when the PSU shroud is moved to its secondary location, you have to remove the end of the shroud and route cables through that path rather than behind the motherboard tray, making it significantly harder to hide cables.

As a positive, the cable bar was shaped perfectly for our motherboard, sitting level with the SATA ports and USB header along the edge of the motherboard so that they're hidden (although some SATA ports were blocked on our motherboard). 

The cable bar sits on two rails that run the full length of the case, so it can be moved up, down, back, and forth to fit flush against various motherboards.

There are stone and wood veneer front panel options, but this is the least exciting aspect of the case's modularity to us, and none of the alternate panels that we've seen are ventilated, so they'd completely seal the front of the case, and we would strongly advise against them.

Finally, there's a solid GPU support included in the accessory kit that can either stand under the GPU or hang from the roof of the case if it's inverted.

MasterFrame 500 Mesh Thermals

Time to get into thermal and acoustic benchmarking.

Thermal testing was done with a mix of configurations. First was a standard layout with the stock configuration, followed by a stock configuration with the motherboard shifted down and the power supply mounted up top, and finally followed by the inverted configuration. 

We moved the power supply as part of the inversion, as that’s the intended use in the manual. 

In all configurations, we kept the PSU fan oriented to pull air from the exterior of the case (facing away from the PSU shroud). The GPU support was not installed for any thermal tests.

The direct head-to-head competitor for the MasterFrame 500 Mesh is the Corsair Frame 5000D RS: it has the same focus on modularity, and it's roughly the same price as well ($190). 

The Frame 5000D RS isn't on our charts yet, so we'll make do with the Frame 4000D RS (read our review) with the caveat that it's smaller and significantly cheaper. 

Otherwise, the MF 500's price puts it up against the Fractal Torrent (watch our review), some variants of the Meshify 3 (read our review), the Antec Flux Pro (watch our review), and Arctic's brand new Xtender, although none of those cases have the same DIY marketing that the Corsair and Cooler Master cases do.

CPU Full Load Thermals - Noise-Normalized

We'll start with noise normalized testing, where we step down case fan speeds inside our hemi-anechoic chamber until we hit our 27 dBA SPL target, measured one meter from the front of the case. We published a video showing our process to build this chamber previously and have gotten regular use out of it since it was built. This allows us to control our acoustic environment so that outside noise doesn’t affect our results. Test hardware like this is made possible through your support on store.gamersnexus.net.

The MF 500 landed in the middle of the chart at 46 degrees Celsius above ambient averaged across all cores and 49 degrees on the P-Cores. The Frame 4000D RS was cooler at 43 degrees all core, and the mesh-fronted cases closer to the MF 500's original $180-$190 price did even better, with the Torrent at 42, Flux Pro at 41, and Meshify 3 at 40. That's not bad, but it's also not impressive given that we'd expect the 200mm stock fans to shine in noise-normalized testing specifically since they’re quieter. $150 to $200 can get you a lot of performance from other manufacturers, and Cooler Master may be hoping that the modularity of the MF 500 will help balance things out.

GPU Full Load Thermals - Noise-Normalized

Moving to GPU thermals in the same test, the average GPU temperature in the MF 500 was 48 degrees Celsius above ambient and 53 degrees on the VRAM. That's behind the competition again, with the Frame 4000D RS averaging 45 degrees above ambient, the Meshify 3 averaging 43, the Flux Pro 41, and the Torrent 40. The MF500 is also beaten by the normal, cheaper Antec Flux.

These results could be altered by tweaking the layout of the MF 500 in a number of ways, though, so let's cover the other configurations next.

CPU Full Load Thermals - Full Speed

With all case fans at full speed, the all core CPU average dropped to 42 degrees above ambient and the P-Core average dropped to 46. Moving the PSU to the top of the case dropped both averages by about two degrees, which is actually a noteworthy improvement and beyond just error. This change would also affect flow-through behavior, which we’ll look at in the GPU chart.

Flipping the entire case in addition to that didn't cause any further change. Moving the PSU to the other side of the case means moving the PSU shroud and the motherboard tray as well, which alters airflow patterns and changes how the CPU cooler lines up with the front intake fans.

For the given CPU performance, the MasterFrame 500 at 39.4 dBA is louder than its immediate neighbors on the chart, like the Lancool 215 (read our review) (which also uses 200mm fans) at 31.1 dBA. The Frame 4000D RS and Torrent are both louder and cooler, which is why we focus on noise-normalized tests for comparing cases, but the Flux Pro averaged 38 degrees all core and the Meshify 3 averaged 39 at roughly equivalent noise levels to the MF 500. Broadly speaking, the peak performance of the MF 500 using stock fans alone is underwhelming.

GPU Full Load Thermals - Full Speed

GPU thermals tell a different story: the stock case configuration averaged 47 degrees above ambient, but top-mounting the PSU caused no change, while inverting the case increased the average to 48. This isn't much of a change, though: we expect that moving or adding fans would have a greater effect than either of the case reconfigurations did.

The GPU thermal results are weaker in comparison to the rest of the chart than the CPU thermals were, with the Frame 4000D RS at 42 degrees for average GPU temperature, the Meshify 3 at 41, the Torrent at 39, and the Flux Pro at 38.

VRM & RAM Full Load Thermals - Full Speed

We typically examine VRM and RAM thermals from the noise-normalized results, but in this instance it's more interesting to compare the different case configurations (which were tested with the case fans at full speed). The inverted case was best for VRM thermals with an average of 26 degrees Celsius above ambient, with the stock configuration and the top-mounted PSU configuration tied at 27. The inverted configuration was also best for RAM thermals with a 19 degree average, but the top-mount PSU layout beat the stock layout by one degree at 20 versus 21.

MasterFrame 500 Mesh Conclusion

The MasterFrame 500 is a promising beginning for the new MasterFrame lineup. Cooler Master seems to go through cycles similar to Corsair where it executes excellently and then goes silent for a while or fumbles. We think the current series is well-built and has good panel build quality, has some good ambitions for its modularity, and is generally a well-executed but simple case. It’s sort of a utilitarian opposite to the more fanciful innovation Hyte is doing in its panel design or Fractal is doing with woods.

This is a case that'll be at its best in the hands of modders that want to cut, print, and drill their own parts, which isn't something that gets shown in by-the-books testing. 

That said, we wish some aspects were more modular: specifically, it'd be cool to be able to disassemble the corners and edges that make up the basic structure of the case. We'd also like to have some spare multi-function bars, fan mounting tabs, and maybe some of the longer metal rails as well.

The direct competitor for this case is the Corsair Frame 5000D (watch our review). Modular parts for the new Corsair Frame cases still haven't really appeared yet, although Corsair has offered us a motherboard tray for testing, so the two cases are in a race to see which will have useful optional parts available first. Cooler Master is already publicly hosting 3D files for the major components of the MasterFrame 500 Mesh (and MasterFrame 600) and it maintains a Printables page for accessories. Corsair began offering some 3D printing files during Computex but is overall behind on this aspect. The MF 500 also has heavier, more solid-feeling construction than Corsair's Frame cases, if that's something that appeals to you.

In terms of thermals, there are easily higher-performance cases available for $200. Each of the high-end mesh fronted cases we compared to (namely the Meshify 3, Torrent, and Flux Pro) outperformed the MF 500, and the smaller, cheaper, and theoretically modular Corsair Frame 4000D RS ARGB (read our review) also generally performed better, but it is smaller. With the MF 500, you're paying for the ability to easily customize it (and the sturdy construction).

Ultimately, at $150, this is significantly more competitive than at its $180 price despite its thermal deficiency versus other cases. It performs okay thermally in our benchmarks, but it isn't anywhere near as good as several other $180 and $200 cases, which is where this was priced when we started reviewing it. Fortunately, if it stays at $150, it drops to a lower price class, and that compensates a lot for the middling thermal performance. Also, at $150, we think the build quality is atypically good. Now, at $180 or $190, it's still good build quality. It's just there's other competition at that price point since you're getting into the kind of that upper echelon of cases. 

It's tough to nail down a recommendation since we don't know why the price keeps changing or where it'll stay. But if it stays at $150 and you're okay with having something that's not the best thermal performer but has this sort of modular mechanical approach to things that it's definitely worth considering. At $180 is still worth considering, but it's also worth considering a lot of the other competition that we named going through the thermal section.

We analyze the Fractal Epoch PC case against some of the best computer cases on the market.

The Highlights

• Fractal's Epoch computer case builds upon the Fractal North chassis, but swaps the front panel to accommodate larger GPUs while driving the price down
• At its price range, we’d buy something else
• The Epoch aims to be more price competitive than Fractal's other modern offerings, helping breathe life into the price category that the Pop Air has occupied
• Original MSRP: $110 MSRP ($130 for RGB)
• Release Date: September 2025

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

Intro

The Fractal Epoch is the Fractal North (watch our review) with a new front panel and a lower price. That makes this simple, except for one massive problem: The name. According to Google, this is pronounced the Epic. According to the Cambridge dictionary, it’s either the E-poch, eh-pock, or epic.

Editor's note: This was originally published on September 2, 2025 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

Credits

Test Lead, Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Testing, Writing

Patrick Lathan

Camera, Video Editing

Vitalii Makhnovets

Camera

Tim Phetdara

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

Fractal's newest case reuses a ton of tooling from the popular North in order to keep costs low, resulting in a $110 MSRP ($130 for RGB). The Epoch's front panel increases GPU clearance without making the case any larger than the compact North it's based on. The new design also comes with 3 stock fans versus the North's 2, so we'll cover the differences in thermal performance in detail, as well as noise testing.

The North itself originally launched at $130, then went to $140, and is now $154. This is almost definitely due to tariffs. With the Meshify 3 (read our review) going for $155 minimum as well, the Epoch fills a budget slot in Fractal's lineup that hasn't really been updated since the Pop Air (watch our review) and Focus 2 came out in 2022.

Today then, we’re reviewing and benchmarking the Fractal Epoch for thermals and acoustics.

Specs copied from manufacturer materials, please read review for our own measurements and opinions

The Build

The build experience in the Epoch is largely the same as it is in the North, but we'll recap some details here. We like the North overall, but at launch, we stated that the North felt like it should be $20-$40 cheaper if it weren't for the wood in the front panel. We also said the wood elevated the case and (arguably) made it worth the price. 

The Epoch lacks wood and it's $20-40 cheaper than the North is currently, so that lines up with the earlier statements. The only challenge is that it’s $30-$40 cheaper than the North’s new price, which is higher.

The Epoch (like the North) is fairly basic. Removing the two-part side panel and the sliding mesh top panel gives good access to the case interior, but there's a clear divide between the Epoch and something like the more expensive Meshify 3, which has fully removable top and front mounts that completely open up the case.

The North's shallow form factor means that GPU clearance is limited to 355mm, which would mash the end of the GPU directly against the front fan mounts. The front of the Epoch has been reworked to push the front fans further into the front panel, hence the listed 372mm GPU clearance. Updating this for the Epoch was worthwhile, although it seems more likely that people are going to try to fit big, expensive GPUs into the North or North XL rather than the plainer Epoch. 

The redesign also means that the new case has more clearance for fans and radiators between the PSU shroud and the fan bracket, up from 36mm to 58mm by our measurements, and there's less material overhanging the front drive bracket. The only downside we noticed with the front panel redesign is that fan cables need to be managed more carefully to avoid getting in the way.

The new design is simpler, with the metal mesh at the front of the Epoch acting as a filter rather than the removable filter in the North. We’ve found that this is better thermally (and in the past, we’ve found in testing that noise-normalized, it’s also superior). You’ll just wipe the front panel down instead.

Our main complaints with the North boiled down to cable management, which was lacking compared to competitors even at the time. That’s because the deeper channel at the front of the case is 3cm deep at most, which can lead to the side panel bulging with poor cable management and a lot of cables, especially since the side panel doesn't hook into the case along that edge. 

It's not an insurmountable problem, which is good, because the Fractal Epoch is exactly the same in that regard. 

The cutout for CPU power connectors is also a little on the small side, and the interior of the PSU shroud can get crowded if both drive trays are used. These space issues are a little more forgivable in the North because the North XL exists as an alternative, but we aren't aware of plans for an Epoch XL.

A couple of features from the North have been removed, presumably to cut costs. There's currently no mesh side panel option for the Epoch, which also means that there's no side fan bracket (and no mounting holes to install one). There's also no built-in fan hub, but Fractal has handled this by daisy-chaining fans in both case variants.

As we saw in the Meshify 3, Fractal uses Type-C shaped connectors (NOT actual USB) for its RGB Momentum fans, but the RGB Epoch uses an adapter that splits out into standard fan and RGB connections.

Otherwise, the differences are neutral cosmetic details. 

The front I/O has been rearranged, the illuminated strip from the North is gone, and the two audio jacks have been combined into one. The USB ports are of the same type and quantity, but the Type-C port is now connected with a flat ribbon cable. The case feet have been redesigned without metal accents (the Epoch's might still be more expensive since each is a unique shape), and the faux-leather pull tab at the back of the case has been replaced with fabric. The captive screw on the half-panel at the front of the case still gets wedged, just like the North, but at this point, we've had to make peace with that.

Fractal Design Epoch Thermals

For thermal testing, we ran one set of tests with the stock non-RGB case, then moved the RGB fans into that same case and ran another set of tests to ensure every other variable remained exactly the same.

Of the cases we've tested lately, the direct comparisons for the Epoch are the Corsair Frame 4000D RS, Phanteks XT Pro Ultra, the Lian Li Lancool 207 (or arguably the 217), and of course Fractal's own North. These are all fairly compact ATX towers in the $90-$110 range, with the Epoch landing at the upper end of that and the North being the highest of all of them. 

The non-RGB Epoch will be our main point of comparison since the RGB version costs $130 and could have slightly worse thermal performance. According to the spec sheet, just like with the Meshify 3, the non-RGB fans can generate more noise and move more air at peak speed. Now we have an opportunity to actually test for differences, although they should be minor, and the rated RPM is 2200 for both models.

CPU Full Load Thermals - Noise-Normalized

We'll start with our noise-normalized test, where we adjust the speed of the stock case fans to hit an overall SPL of 27 dBA as measured in our hemi-anechoic chamber. We built this chamber to allow more accurate testing and normalization by eliminating external noises that may affect day-to-day noise floor.

With a full-system torture workload, CPU temperature in the Epoch was 43 degrees Celsius above ambient for the all-core average and 47 degrees on the P-cores, and the temperatures with RGB fans were within one degree for both measurements for the 2 cases. Fractal's claim is that the non-RGB fans are a little louder and higher CFM, which could mean that our noise normalization reverses or equalizes for performance differences.

The Epoch outperformed the original North, which came with two 140mm fans and averaged 46 degrees above ambient all-core and 50 degrees P-core. The glass-sided North is more similar to the Epoch, but the mesh option is an advantage for the case, lowering the all-core average to 44 degrees above ambient and 48 degrees over ambient P-core. 

The Phanteks XT Pro Ultra was even warmer than the glass North, which means the Epoch is also better than the XT Pro Ultra. The Corsair Frame 4000D RS was within error of the Epoch and functionally the same, which makes sense given the similar layout and fan arrangement. The most serious competition comes from Lian Li's dirt-cheap Lancool 207 (read our review) with its 41 degree average, as well as the more expensive 217 (read our review), also at 41. These cases are at about 45 degrees for the P cores.

GPU Full Load Thermals - Noise-Normalized

Moving to GPU thermals in the same test, the Epoch RGB averaged 45 degrees above ambient and the regular Epoch averaged 46. Memory temperatures showed a slightly wider delta, with the Epoch RGB at 49 and Epoch at 51. The regular Epoch was louder at max speed, so it required a greater fan speed reduction to hit our noise-normalized threshold, which explains the temperature difference in combination with a +/-1 degree range.

The regular Epoch outperformed the glass North's 48-degree average and tied the mesh North at 46. The Phanteks XT Pro Ultra came closer to the Epoch here than it did for CPU thermals, although the memory temperature was a weak point for the Phanteks case at 54 degrees over ambient. 

The Frame 4000D did well with a 45 degree GPU average, while the Lian Li cases again are ahead, with the 207 and 217 "GPU Mode" showing similar performance at 42 degrees above ambient on the GPU. Credit to Fractal for still having the best GPU thermal performer with the Torrent (read our review) though, tying the Flux Pro (read our review). These are much more expensive cases. 

GPU Full Load Thermals - Full Speed

We’re switching to full speed tests now, which means we allow noise to become a variable. The noise level is next to the case name.

At full speed, the non-RGB and RGB cases didn't show much of a difference in thermal performance, but they did in noise. The stock Epoch with non-RGB fans measured 42.2 dBA, while the RGB case measured 39.3 dBA. That lines up with Fractal's claims, which have a regular Momentum 12 at 31.3 dBA and a Momentum 12 RGB at 28.03 dBA in their testing. These hard numbers are different because they are tested in different environments and methods -- we’re measuring total system noise, not just the fans.

The average GPU temperature with the RGB fans in the Epoch was technically lower at 43.6 degrees average, but not enough to be outside the margin for error, and the average GPU memory temperatures were nearly identical between RGB and non-RGB.

The North with its stock fans almost kept up, with the mesh-sided result only one degree warmer and the glass-sided result at 46 degrees above ambient, although noise levels were higher than the Epoch. Each of the other competitor cases we mentioned performed better, though, starting with the XT Pro Ultra at 43 degrees, then the Frame 4000D at 42, the Lancool 217 at 39-40 in an ideal configuration, and finally the Lancool 207 at 38 degrees above ambient and roughly the same noise level as the Epoch.

Noise levels have the Epoch about the same as the Antec Flux Pro when at max fan speed, with the Flux Pro running far cooler with its superior fans. The Flux Pro is also $165 to $180, depending on promos, so it’s not the same price class.

GPU Full Load Thermals - Standardized Fans

Using our standardized set of two 140mm intake fans and one 120mm exhaust allows us to make a true head-to-head comparison between the North and Epoch front panels, without stock fans as a variable. 

In terms of GPU thermals, the Epoch, the mesh-sided North, and the glass-sided North all averaged the same: 46 degrees above ambient. The Epoch's front panel may be cheaper, but it's not worse for thermals.

CPU Full Load Thermals - Standardized Fans

CPU thermals between the two North variants in the standardized fan test were also very similar, but the Epoch was about one degree cooler, averaging 38 degrees above ambient all-core and 42 on the P-Cores alone. The new front panel seems to be slightly more open, but any further performance advantages for the Epoch are down to its stock fans.

VRM & RAM Full Load Thermals - Noise-Normalized

Back to the noise normalized test, the Epoch RGB's VRM temperature averaged 29 degrees above ambient and the regular Epoch averaged 30. That's better than either North variant, but 217 remains top of the chart at 26 degrees.

Fractal Design Epoch Conclusion

The Epoch is entering a market where every dollar counts. This is a harder market to compete in than the $150-$180 range.

We think $110 is at the upper limit of what Fractal can realistically ask for this model. It's a North without the wood, and while the trendsetting wood accents will keep the North selling even at $140+, a North without the wood is a reliable but unexciting compact mid-tower, even if the performance is a little better and there's a little more GPU clearance.

Fractal has steep competition from Corsair, Phanteks, and Lian Li, among others.

Corsair's Frame 4000D RS (the one with three stock fans) is basically the same thing as the Epoch, and as of this writing, it's on sale for $95. We weren't terribly impressed with the Phanteks XT Pro Ultra's thermal performance, but it's currently even cheaper at $80 after a rebate on Newegg. The most ruthless competition is from Lian Li, as usual, with its cutthroat prices. It's selling its wood-trimmed Lancool 217 for as little as $120, but a more direct comparison for the Epoch is the $82 compact Lancool 207, and even the 207 Digital with an integrated LCD is on sale for $105. 
It’s good that Fractal is updating its budget offerings because it hasn’t had a refresh here in a couple years, but there's not a particularly strong reason other than brand loyalty to choose the Epoch over its cheaper competition. The North is a good case, but it’s primarily good because of the front panel and the optional mesh side panel. The Epoch is the North without either of those, leaving it as simply “fine.” It’s OK. But competing in the lower price classes, we’d buy something else.

The revised version of TRYX’s LUCA L70 still has issues of varying kinds, but the case has at least improved and the company has made several changes that have resolved some nagging issues.

The Highlights

• TRYX has remade parts of its LUCA L70 case in response to one of our most critical case reviews in a few years
• We appreciate TRYX's response and some of its changes; however, unfortunately, the case again arrived with out-of-the-box issues that are primarily a result of design and not shipping
• Ultimately, this case is still not competitive against other cases that are cheaper than its (now) $250 price, up from $240, but in the very least, some of the issues have been resolved
• Original MSRP: $250

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

Intro

Tryx canceled the release of its $240 LUCA L70 case after our original review in order to rework the case to try and prevent things like the side panel coming off if you tilt the case on its side.

We tried it again with the company’s revised case and it didn’t come loose and fall out this time. That’s a good start for TRYX.
About a year ago, we published our critical review of the TRYX LUCA L70 with a lot of concerns about build quality and quality control.

Editor's note: This was originally published on July 2, 2025 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

Credits

Test Lead, Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Testing, Writing

Patrick Lathan

Camera, Video Editing

Vitalii Makhnovets

Camera

Tim Phetdara

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

In response to our review, the company sent us a gigantic PDF detailing everything they’d changed in response to the review. This is a great approach to handling it and we want to make sure they are acknowledged for taking the time to pause the launch and then try to address things. They still, of course, have to deliver on those changes and actually fix it, but the fact that TRYX was willing to entertain this at all is better than most other companies in the space. So, credit to them for that.  

Unfortunately though, the unit they shipped for re-evaluation came with screws that had been knocked loose, a bent hinge, and other problems -- but we’ll walk through each of these documented changes today.

Tryx’s L70 was an unusual new case from a company that was (at the time) brand-new and it used to be mostly known for its Panorama cooler (check out our coverage of it). 

Well, it still is mostly known for its Panorama cooler, but it used to be, too. 

Tryx’s cooler has recently been copied by companies like ASUS and Thermalright at Computex 2025, with ASUS being particularly personal since some of Tryx’s team came from ASUS. 

More recently, Tryx showed off its Flova case with the possibility of adding a crossflow fan to ATX, which was interesting on its own. But the point is that TRYX is interesting enough to its competitors that some of them are starting to copy it. 

But, again, the L70 was a really bad start.

To the company's credit, TRYX responded to our criticism by halting production while it implemented fixes, which is rare. Fractal pulled a similar move with the Meshify 3 (read our review) ahead of launch, where reviewer complaints about PCIe slot tightness triggered a pause. 

In fact, Fractal even recalled a prior case right when right at launch to rectify a fire hazard from a poor PCB design.

Today, we’re evaluating the L70’s changes. The thermals don’t change and the review basics don’t change from last time, so we won’t re-do all of that. We’ll focus on just the modifications that Tryx made, making this a much simpler revisit.

We’ll start with the fasteners and panel adjustment issues.

Last time, we started by showing shipping damage that led to a cascade of failures with the top panel sagging, fasteners misaligning, the side panel coming loose, and then finally the side panel falling off and tearing out chunks of the case. These issues stem from design problems. 

We want to be clear about one thing, though: Tryx has repeatedly reframed our complaints as shipping damage in communications with them at events like Computex, but the majority of our complaints were about design, quality of life features, and quality control at the factory, not shipping. Shipping was just one part of what was otherwise a mess of a case.

And even when it comes to shipping, the damage itself wasn't the main problem: the fact that the case was vulnerable to damage was one item on a laundry list of other quality-of-life complaints, none of which were acceptable in a $240 case. Due to everything that's happened since September 2024, that MSRP has (understandably) increased to $250.

TRYX stayed in contact over the months and provided us with a list of proposed changes, then a final overview of the actual production changes. Things like the side panel attachment, drive brackets, cable lengths, grommets, and even the typo on the handle are part of a long list of changes. 

But some things have remained the same, like a bent hinge in the new sample. 

We're going to go into minute detail here regarding things that are different from the original sample: if you want more general information about the case and thermal performance, watch our original review. This is going to be a highly specific follow-up.

Accepted Changes

Starting with the accepted changes:

Tryx says that items like the massive gouges in the aluminum feet, bent support for the SSD mounting bracket, deformed fan rails, damaged front I/O and power button area, and bent motherboard tray have been addressed with "increased EPE material density to improve protection during shipping." We think that's probably true, but we don't have the original foam on hand to compare, and the before-and-after pictures in TRYX's document are the same photograph but mirrored. We’re not sure why they did that. TRYX originally indicated that it intended to add extra warnings about fragility to the external packaging, but this wasn't included in the final change list.

Our new review sample arrived mostly unscathed, with one exception:

There was a severely bent lower hingepin on the front panel; however, we again believe this is a factory defect, not shipping damage. 

When the panel is opened, the pin pops out. This is a sample that TRYX sent directly to us, not an undercover purchase, so our confidence in their quality control is non-existent. That’s twice now. 

We also found that one of the motherboard standoffs came loose during shipping and was stuck to a magnet elsewhere in the case, although every other standoff remained tight.

First of all, it’s the company’s responsibility to get a product to an end user without damage. This is twice now that this case has arrived with issues, indicating to us a combination of QC issues and shipping issues. Secondly, it is easy to hide behind “shipping damage” and throw carriers under the bus as a universally hated boogie man, but this is twice now that this has happened, and again, evidence points toward factory QC issues. Even on the shipping side, if a product is fragile, it is up to the manufacturer to figure out how to pack it. 

Tryx reworked the side panel to try and deal with some of this. There are some positives in this panel rework.

TRYX has limited control over shipping damage; the bigger problem in our original review was that an impact on the corner of the case was able to seriously damage its function. Specifically, the glass side panel was knocked out of alignment with the snaps on the case on the original, allowing it to flop out on the table and tear off chunks of metal in the process. 

The major change here is "positioning rivets on the glass panels for transportation, preventing chassis deformation." 

These rivets support the top panel when the side panels are installed and should keep the snaps correctly aligned, which is a solid improvement from TRYX that we’re happy to see. 

The top panel itself doesn't appear to have been reinforced, unfortunately, but the rivets should be adequate as long as the glass panels are installed.

In addition, TRYX says it "removed the hovering function on glass side panel," meaning that the panel doesn't hang open on studs (the parts that tore off). This seems like a wise tradeoff to us; the hovering function isn't important enough to risk permanent damage.

A screw has also been added to the glass side panel to secure it during shipping, as well as a sticker warning about the presence of the screw. The screw is useful for carrying the case around or shipping it. This is a good improvement. We’ve maintained that glass panels should be securable with screws if only for transit, so we’re happy to see this. Even still, with the addition of the rivets, we're comfortable removing the screw for daily use now.

But like the damaged hinge, not every change actually addressed the problems.

In the original L70, the motherboard tray and PSU cage were fastened in with thumbscrews AND little flush-head screws that required a driver, defeating the purpose of using the marketed toolless thumbscrews since tools were required. 

TRYX made a partial change here: it explained that "flush screws are included for transport reinforcement and can be removed once the build is complete," 

Which is fine, but doesn’t change the fact that it’s not tool-less, but OK, and its fix was to use larger still-not-tool-less screws despite being marketed as tool-less removal "to avoid being inconspicuous, preventing users from overlooking them during use." 

We don't consider all of these screws optional, and we don't think they were inconspicuous, so this isn't a real change from our perspective.

One of our other original complaints had to do with I/O cables that weren’t long enough to be easily routed around the SSD bracket.

The updated L70 has a 750mm USB Type-C cable, which translates to about 10cm of additional usable length. Lengths for the other cables remain unchanged, but with our specific test bench hardware, all the cables are now able to reach. The 10cm extension fixes the issue.

The metal strip that extended the motherboard tray in the original L70 would block cable cutouts at either the top or the bottom of the motherboard depending on the case configuration. This was another major design oversight that had nothing to do with shipping.

In the updated model, the strip has been cut away so that audio, front panel, and fan connectors can fit around it at the bottom of the case. EPS12V cables have more room at the top of the case as well, although it's still a tight fit. But, these were good changes to something that was just a design problem.

Another issue we found on the original was that SATA cables could catch on the edge of drive brackets. 

It was as if no one had installed a 2.5” drive to test functionality in the original. Now, the mounting holes on the main drive bracket have been moved. This change fully fixes that issue.

The power button was another problem in the original, mostly because it had a sort of gross, squishy compression that felt like a design issue.

TRYX, at first, defended the power button design as an "anti-false touch function" to "avoid accidental presses due to its edge location," which was a response to our complaint about just how awful the button felt. But they decided to change it anyway, and it's now been updated to work the way it looks like it's supposed to. The PCB is still marked as revision 1.0, so the only material change appears to be the removal of a small shim behind the button. We prefer the new version and think it’s improved.

Cable grommets were also problematic on the original, mostly because they were easily ripped out during cable management.

The cable grommets have been molded from a stiffer material, likely a different durometer, and have been reshaped so that they're less likely to get dragged out by cables. This is a really subtle change, but it seems to have fixed that issue. We’re satisfied with the fix.

We have mixed feelings about the changes made to the captive screws throughout the case. 

Most (but not all) of the screws have been replaced with a new design with more thread, which TRYX says is "for more intuitive alignment, reducing misalignment and ensuring a smoother, faster installation." At the same time, a metal tab was added to the PSU enclosure "for enhanced PSU chamber stability and an easier PSU shroud installation," but none of these are things we mentioned or had difficulty with. They don’t fix the problems with the captive screw situation.

The misused captive screw that has to be un-captiv-ated to move the PSU shroud is still present, and the motherboard tray is unchanged despite TRYX's original intention to remove the embossing that can lead to the screws threading into both mating surfaces at the same time. They showed intent to fix it, then didn’t, and so we still end up with misused and mismatched captive and non-captive screws and screws that sometimes thread into multiple mating surfaces that just demonstrate issues with basics. 

Finally, the easiest thing to fix: The typo.

We talked last time about how companies really struggle with the word “unknown,” including Intel with Gunnir -- twice -- with its “Into the Unkonw” video card. 

Tryx also did, as it had the "discovered an unknow" typo on the handle. This has been fixed by redacting an additional letter. That was extremely low on our list of complaints, but since TRYX had to rebuild every case anyway, it made sense to take care of it.

Additional Changes

There were a couple of changes made by TRYX that weren't directly related to our review, which is a good sign. The ones reported by TRYX were that small transparent protectors were added to the bottom corners of the glass side panel.

These are a nice touch that we appreciate. They also added eight HDD screws to the accessory kit (none were included previously) and they drilled four additional holes in the main drive bracket to improve HDD mounting compatibility.

Rejected Changes

Finally, there were some changes that TRYX opted not to make. It defended its choices.

First off, the lack of fan screws: "Since no fan is pre-installed, we assume users will use screws that come with their own fans." 

Next, the crowded bottom of the case layering a fan bracket, the steel mesh of the chassis itself with its own built-in fan mounts, a filter, and then the aluminum base that obstruct flow: "This is a modular design case, and we considered scenarios where users might swap the PSU positions to try different configurations. In such cases, the additional fan tray becomes useful. Users don’t need to unscrew fans or radiators—they can simply unscrew the captive screws and relocate the tray onto the top plate. In addition, this fan bracket allows easy installation of fans or radiators outside the chassis and can be offset to avoid interference with motherboard connectors [...] The detachable bracket allows users to remove it for enhanced airflow when necessary."

Sure, and we don't disagree with any of that -- but we'd still prefer a less cluttered design with better airflow. You can certainly choose to obstruct airflow however you want, and plenty of cases do that.

Regarding the aluminum side panel and base: "This is part of the LUCA L70’s ID design. Thermal performance is important for this case, but we also want to ensure its aesthetics appeal to its target audience. While there may be some trade-offs in terms of thermal performance, we believe the impact is within the tolerance range. The aluminum base reinforces chassis strength and serves an aesthetic purpose. It was modified with additional cutouts after Computex 2024 for increased air intake. Internal testing showed that removing the base results in a 1°C difference in temperature, so the impact to performance may be negligible to most users."

We also saw approximately the same 1°C difference, but our interpretation was that the bottom vent is restricted even without the aluminum base. Otherwise, this statement basically aligns with what we said in our review. This version of the L70 is sold based on how it looks more than how it performs, and we'll hold the mesh-fronted version of the case to a higher thermal standard. 

TRYX also stated that “The center base piece is detachable, allowing users to remove it when additional cooling is needed.” This is technically true but not worth considering.

The cable cover/SSD mount towards the front of the case doesn't fit drives well in any configuration. This was something else we had complained about. TRYX made no changes here, but stated that "in most scenarios, we recommend using the bracket behind the motherboard tray to mount SSDs, while the bracket to the left primarily serves as a cable cover."

With our original sample, the bracket that fastened the PSU to the case was an extremely tight fit, the PSU itself was a tight fit, and 190mm PSUs (the max compatibility claimed) wouldn't have enough room to comfortably fit cables and would block the cable cutout on the top of the shroud. No changes were made here. 

TRYX noted that the enclosure size was chosen to increase fan and radiator compatibility.

Conclusion

We appreciate that TRYX directly addressed nearly every criticism that we made and attempted to fix several of them. 

The simple addition of the studs to the glass panels adds significant structural stability, and smaller quality of life changes like the power button, the rearrangement of SSD mounting holes, reshaping the motherboard tray extension, and lengthening the USB Type-C cable are all upgrades. 

That said, these are patches to an existing design and they don't fundamentally alter the case, which still doesn't compete strongly at its price in terms of ease-of-use or thermals. $250 is more expensive than the HAVN HS420 (which we like), and it's on par with the similarly-styled ASUS ROG Strix Helios (which we hated, but is built to a higher standard and comes with fans) and the extremely expensive Fractal Meshify 3 Pro Ambience RGB. 

We think there are a lot of way better cases at or under $250, but if you really like how the LUCA L70 looks, then this is a big improvement over what we saw last year. The company is at least listening.

We review the Lian Li Lancool 217 and benchmark its thermal performance in CPU and GPU tests and evaluate acoustics and noise levels

The Highlights

• Lancool 217 comes with 5 fans and uses weirdly sized fans at 2x 170mm for front intake
• Though it includes some logical changes, the Lancool 217 isn't leaps and bounds ahead of the Lancool 216
• The case comes with a more complex implementation of wood that requires tighter manufacturing tolerances but our sample looked good
• Original MSRP: $120 (black), $125 (white)
• Release Date: May 2, 2025

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

Intro

Today we’re reviewing the Lian Li Lancool 217. It's a $120-$125 case and uses weirdly sized fans at 2x 170mm for front intake. Internally, the case comes with 3 more fans. And they're interesting because they are 11-blade ones. The case also comes with wood paneling on the sides, and a lot of mesh ventilation on the front of the case. The lower quarter-panel of the left side also uses mesh to feed intake to the GPU directly via shroud-top holes.

Editor's note: This was originally published on June 14, 2025 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

Credits

Test Lead, Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Testing, Writing

Patrick Lathan

Editing

Mike Gaglione

Camera, Video Editing

Vitalii Makhnovets
Tim Phetdara

Camera

Tannen Williams

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

The Lancool 217 ships with five fans: two 170mm front intake, two 120mm shroud-top intake with reversed blades, and one acts as rear exhaust. The shroud-top fans can be moved down to the inside surface of the shroud, which reduces space available for drives, cables, and the PSU, but clears the way for a vertical GPU mount. There's a third fan mount on the shroud that's blocked off by the PSU; its only purpose seems to be compatibility with 3x120 UNI fan kits.

Four of the five case fans are mounted tool-lessly, and the front fans in particular can be rearranged into "CPU Mode" or "GPU Mode" with plastic spacers in between. 

Lian Li also included a full set of longer screws to make the tool-less mounting system work specifically with the 28mm-thick UNI fans.

Lian Li's Lancool 215 launched five years ago. It was groundbreaking at the time due to the two 200mm intake fans, generally only found on large, expensive cases, but with a brutally low MSRP of $70 achieved by contracting out case production and that put a lot of pressure on the industry. 

The $120-$125 price for the 217 isn't as unbelievably low as the 215's was, but Lian Li has preserved several features of the 21X series. 

The case also has a 90-degree rotated PSU mount and an elaborate vertical GPU mount that's compatible with shroud-top fans for once, although it requires a separately-purchased riser cable to use.

Lian Li Lancool 217 Overview

Lian Li says that the self-described "Contemporary Wood Accent" requires particularly tight manufacturing tolerances. Other cases like the Fractal North (read our review) opt for isolated strips that don't need to perfectly line up, but the wood elements in our 217 all sit flush with each other, and the front mesh actually seats into the wood at the bottom. On our sample, it ends up looking pretty good with no big gaps. 

We usually only see wood used as decoration, and we've seen the risks of using it as a functional element with the cracked panel on our Fractal Era 2 (read our review). 

The arrangement of the trim reminds us of the Antec Flux and Flux Pro (read our review) cases, which Lian Li may be targeting with the release of the 217.

Lian Li Lancool 217 Specs

*Specs copied from manufacturer materials, please read review for our own measurements and opinions

The Build

Let's start with "CPU Mode" and "GPU Mode." This is something Lian Li has done in the past but have changed their execution this time. The two front 170mm fans are attached tool-lessly by screwing rubber washers onto the fans and then sliding them into place, a common method for installing storage drives. Between these fans, two plastic blanks can be inserted like old-school 5.25" covers. The blanks also help to guide flow and prevent re-circulation. 

The case ships in GPU mode, meaning (from top to bottom) spacer/fan/spacer/fan with a bias towards airflow lower in the case. 

It can be reconfigured to CPU mode, meaning fan/fan/spacer/spacer with the fans higher up. This is similar in spirit to the "air cooling mode" and "water cooling mode" configurations of the Lancool 216 (watch our review), but more streamlined, practical, and a lot easier to use.

Alternatively, normal fan rails can be installed at the front with 120mm or 140mm spacing, but that would be a waste since the 170mm fans can't be relocated to any other part of the case. The fans are factored into the case's price, and each belongs to a clearly designated area, so it makes the most sense to buy the 217 if you're planning to leave the stock fans alone.

Making a vertical mount that's compatible with shroud-mounted fans is tricky, and Lian Li accomplished it with an elaborate collection of hardware: a tiny shroud extension at the front so the fans can be shifted forwards, another slightly larger extension at the back to mount a standoff to, then the standoffs. With all that in the accessory kit, it’s not usable for a vertical GPU without a riser cable, which they don’t include, but it’d also heavily impact the price.

The removable top radiator bracket is a welcome return from the 216; it can support up to a 360mm radiator without issue, but other mounting locations would require moving the stock fans. We found ourselves removing the top bracket and popping the tool-less front fans off to work inside the case, which makes components accessible from multiple angles.

PSUs can be mounted in either "Standard Mode" for up to 220mm length or "Rotated Mode" (the default) for up to 180mm length. As with the Lancool 207 (read our review), we suggest sticking to shorter (~150mm) PSUs in rotated mode to allow extra room for cable bends. 

If you use one of Lian Li's Edge PSUs, it must be mounted fan-side-up and will compete with the GPU for air.

A fan and RGB hub is included, which may be another feature intended for UNI fan compatibility given that the case doesn't ship with any RGB LEDs. The hub splits SATA power, a 5V ARGB input, and a 4-pin PWM fan input across four ARGB outputs and six fan outputs. 

The manual specifies which fans should be connected to each port, but we confirmed (with a tachometer) that fans run at the same speed regardless of which port is used.

There are two power buttons. There's the obvious one at the top of the case, but there's another tucked away with the rest of the I/O on the side of the case. This is a continuation of the 216 (watch our review), which allowed swapping the entire I/O assembly between the two locations. It’s a compromise as compared to the 216’s swappable options. The buttons are hardwired to a unified front panel connector, so they can only be used for power. 

Lian Li has already responded to user criticism of the lack of support for moving the I/O by announcing that its 217 Infinity (which we saw at Computex) will allow I/O top-mounted as well.

There are two other features from the 216 that were dropped. First, the unusual fan bracket that could be stuck over the rear expansion slots is gone, but our original testing didn't show any significant benefit to installing a fan there. Secondly, Lian Li has dropped the screw from the glass panel, which is a nitpick we'll always bring up: glass panels should have a way to be fastened down securely for transit.

The drive support is difficult to summarize on a spec sheet. There are two 2.5" mounts behind the motherboard tray, but only one of them can be used if an mATX back-connect board is installed. There's another 2.5" mounting location on top of the PSU shroud (if the rearmost fan slot isn't used). Finally, there are two traditional HDD cages in the accessory kit that fit underneath the PSU shroud, each of which fits two drives in any combination of 3.5" and 2.5." This is unusually generous for a modern case, but keep in mind that only one drive cage will fit with the PSU in standard mode.

The 217 includes the same flip-able cable grommet bar that the 216 did. Rotating the bar gives clearance and exposes standoffs for SSI-EEB boards up to 330mm in width.

Cable management space depends on the PSU orientation and drive cages, but the cable cutouts are large and aren't compromised as a result of back-connect compatibility. Removing the small GPU support opens up another large cutout, although it lacks a rubber grommet. The plastic clips at the rear of the case from the 216 are back, making EPS12V cable routing especially easy. 

When our sample shipped, the mesh section below the glass side panel had deformed slightly, probably during shipping. We were able to bend it back, but the metal in this area is thin and hard to perfectly flatten.

Lian Li Lancool 217 Thermals

Lian Li includes a front filter in the accessory kit, with a note in the manual that states "if you need better performance, please do not install this filter." Based on this, we treated the filter-less case as stock and ran one test with it installed. We ran CPU mode, GPU mode, and a test with the GPU installed vertically in GPU mode, although (as we explained earlier) we were forced to install the GPU one slot closer to the glass than we wanted to because of the length of the PCIe riser cable that we had.

Fractal's recent Meshify 3 (read our review) is an obvious point of comparison for the Lancool 217 with prices as low as $140; our charted results are for the more expensive RGB variant, but performance should be similar between the Meshify 3 SKUs. Antec's Flux and Flux Pro may be the closest cases on the market in terms of both price and appearance, to the point that it seems like an intentional strategy from Lian Li, but for now we only have the Flux Pro on our charts. The Pro has a couple features that more closely match the 217, like the three available shroud-top fan mounts and rotatable PSU, but the non-Pro is the one that matches the 217's price. Montech's HS01 Pro (read our review) is another case with a mesh front and a high stock fan count that's launched recently; we generally preferred the glass-fronted HS02, but the HS01 Pro directly competes for the 217's market.

CPU Full Load Thermals - Noise-Normalized

We'll start with noise-normalized thermals, where we use our hemi-anechoic chamber to measure the overall SPL of the case and then lower fan speeds in tandem until it hits our threshold of 27 dBA. 

Noise levels were slightly different in the 217’s CPU mode and GPU mode (as we'll detail later on), so they required slightly different fan settings in order to hit the threshold. With those adjustments, both configurations averaged 41 degrees Celsius above ambient across all cores and 45 degrees across the P-cores. This is also exactly why we have the acoustic chamber -- we wouldn’t be able to pick up such small differences in noise before, and that slight adjustment shows that they’re about the same for the CPU once we adjust for RPM.

The Meshify 3 placed higher on the chart than the 217, but its results were close enough to be basically equivalent at 40 degrees all-core and 44 P-core. Montech's HS01 Pro uses a bottom-intake configuration and therefore has comparatively weak CPU thermals with our test hardware, averaging 49 all-core. Meanwhile, the Antec Flux Pro matches the Lancool 217's thermal performance here almost exactly, although again the non-Pro variant is a closer match in price.

Lian Li's older Lancool 216 also remains unbeaten here, with thermals that closely match the Meshify 3 and are therefore pretty close to the 217 as well. The 216 had highly unusual 160mm intake fans, especially for the time, with extra-wide frames to prevent air re-circulation, and we found them effective in our review and that still holds up today.

GPU Full Load Thermals - Noise-Normalized

Looking at the GPU thermal data for the same set of noise-normalized results reveals a more significant gap between the case configurations. CPU mode is at 44 degrees above ambient for the average GPU temperature and 48 degrees for GPU memory, while GPU mode dropped that to 42 and 45 degrees, respectively. Given that the previous chart showed CPU temperatures were unaffected, that makes GPU mode the better configuration overall for our test hardware. Although there are two intake fans directly below the GPU, biasing the front intake fans lower in the case has a chance to improve thermals even further. That lines up with what we generally found even with the previous iteration of our test bench, where GPU thermals generally had more room for improvement than CPU in high-airflow cases.

GPU mode gave the 217 a slight advantage over the Meshify 3, although the delta was less than one degree with the Meshify 3 averaging 43 degrees above ambient. The HS01 Pro ran similarly to the Meshify 3, and the Flux Pro landed on top at 41 degrees.

The older 216 performed similarly to the HS01 Pro with a 43 degree average, which is to say it also performed similarly to the 217. All the results we have recorded for the 216 this time around are in the stock configuration; in our original review, we found that the alternate air-cooling mode slightly improved GPU thermals and slightly worsened CPU thermals with an old bench.

GPU Full Load Thermals - Full Speed

Moving to the full speed tests, the Lancool 217 is now the loudest case on this chart other than the Fractal North XL, measuring in at 44.8 dBA with all five fans running at their maximum speed (44.3 in CPU mode). We'll skip right to GPU thermals here, since CPU thermals were the same in all four tested configurations. As expected, the vertically mounted GPU test had the worst average at 47 degrees above ambient, followed by CPU mode at 43 degrees, then GPU mode at 40 degrees. This would improve with a GPU in the slot closer to the board.

Installing the front filter had no significant effect on thermals or noise in this test, which isn't something we see often, so Lian Li deserves some credit. Technically the result with the filter installed had a slightly cooler average than without, but within our one degree margin for test variance, and the GPU memory temperature stayed at 41 degrees for both tests. This is within error. That means that the filter has minimal impact on GPU thermals in our test, so it isn’t that obstructive. That’s good for Lian Li. 

The GPU Mode 217 outperformed the Meshify 3 and HS01 Pro by about one degree, but it's also audibly louder than either of those cases, while the Flux Pro manages to be both cooler at 38 degrees and quieter at 39.7 dBA in comparison to the 217.

This is the first test we've seen so far where the 217 puts a gap between itself and the 216, with the older 216 averaging 43 degrees above ambient.

VRM & RAM Full Load Thermals - Full Speed

We would normally examine the VRM and RAM thermals from the noise-normalized results, but sticking with the full speed chart instead allows us to see how the various configurations affected motherboard temperatures. All four of the VR VCC sensor results recorded for the 217 rank among the best we've seen, with the CPU mode result at 20 degrees above ambient, both GPU mode results at 19, and the vertical GPU result at 17 degrees. Mounting the GPU vertically doesn't do the GPU itself any favors, but in the 217 it allows the bottom intake fans to blow directly up through the case without being blocked by the horizontal GPU cooler.

SPD Hub temperatures from the RAM were similarly excellent, with the vertical GPU result also on top at 10 degrees above ambient. GPU temperatures are a higher priority, but motherboard temperatures are worth taking into account when evaluating vertical GPU mounts, which we’re doing here.

Lian Li Lancool 217 Conclusion

The Lancool 217 isn't leaps and bounds ahead of the previous Lancool 216, but it includes some logical changes and improvements based on case trends (wood, back connect motherboard support) as well as Lian Li's own products (EDGE PSUs, STRIMER cables, UNI fans). 

The wooden decoration on the front panel is the most significant change, followed by the tool-less fans which make reconfiguration easier than it was in the 216. The 216 already had excellent thermal performance, and for the most part the 217 simply matches it, only really pulling ahead when the case fans are all pushed to max speed (which is impractical due to noise).

At $120, the 217 competes favorably with the similarly-performing but more expensive $140+ Meshify 3, although Fractal has options for RGB lighting. The fans and performance you get for the money push the 217 past Montech's HS01 Pro, leaving the $120 Antec Flux non-Pro as the strongest contender. 

The 217 seems to be Lian Li's attempt to match the Flux Pro in performance and features while matching the size and price of the non-Pro, and it's a success in those aspects. That said, the Flux non-Pro is similar to the 217, and the comparison between the two comes down to some very specific items. 

The 217 has excellent stock fans, more spare connections on its built-in fan hub, support for rotated PSUs, it fits SSI-EEB motherboards, it can fit a greater number of drives, and it has some out-of-the-box support for vertical GPU mounting (although it doesn't include a riser cable). The Flux has potentially better airflow at the bottom of the case due to its ventilated floor, and its fan layout is more reconfigurable since all the stock fans are either 120s or 140s. Some of us at GN prefer the 217, but it's a tight race.

We’ve rounded up the best PC cases we saw at Computex 2025

The Highlights

• Thermalright is known for making a ton of cheap coolers and its trying that strategy with cases, starting with a $45 one
• SilverStone’s FLP02 is a retro-themed case that features 5.25” bay covers that resemble floppy drives
• Cooler Master showed off its MF cases, which offer a modular approach to case design
• Hyte’x X50 is the company’s most mechanically complicated product to manufacture to-date
• Lian Li is embedding fans into its case’s glass front panels

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

Intro

During our Computex 2025 trip, we saw numerous case announcements. In this story, we’ve rounded up the most promising cases.

The showstopper this year was Silverstone’s FLP02, which is a retro-themed PC case with a functioning real turbo button, molded 5 and a ¼-inch drive bay covers that resemble floppies, and a throwback look with modern compatibility.    
Corsair also made bold moves. It had a case that split its radiator chamber into its own isolated compartment.

Thermalright is also threatening the case industry the same way it did to the cooler industry by bringing a $45 MicroATX case to the market.

Editor's note: This was originally published on June 1, 2025 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

Credits

Host, Writing, Editing

Steve Burke

Camera, Editing

Mike Gaglione

Camera

Vitalii Makhnovets

Editing

Tim Phetdara
Andrew Coleman

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

Cooler Master is back on the scene, too, introducing its MF series of cases.  

HAVN has the BF360, which couples a heavy focus on fan design and case-thermal engineering to content with Hyte’s X50, for what each company hopes will be the top performing case on thermal charts. 

This story will re-cap some of the best cases that we think are coming out over the next few months. We’ll, of course, have to review these cases as they launch, which means we’ll have a busy year with cases. We also plan on running a story on the best cases of 2025 at the end of the year, which will include all of our test data. For now, we’re looking at the best cases from Computex 2025. 

Thermalright TR M10

Thermalright is best known for making a ton of cheap coolers. The company is applying that strategy to their first case, which they announced at Computex. Thermalright revealed its TR M10 MicroATX case, which will start at $45 and scale up to $65 for a model that includes an LCD and a digital display. Neither variant will include fans. 

The case has good cable management depth and simple cable-management passthroughs without BTF support. It also has heavily ventilated panels everywhere. The TR M10 fits 3x120mm side-mounted fans for intake and can technically fit fans at the top of the power-supply shroud. This is made somewhat more viable, although distance is a challenge, by all of the holes punched through the floor of the case and even the drive cages.

The more expensive $65 variant will feature an RGB digital display at the front that’s capable of spitting out basic numbers or seven-segment text. Externally, the case is simple. Thermalright has punched holes everywhere including the company’s logo on the side panel. The case also has a glass front and side. 

Thermalright has added shiny plastic accents to the top and front. It's intended to look like brushed aluminum, though we don’t think it looks like that. The ventilation everywhere is at least promising for thermal performance at its price. 

If the company is able to apply its CPU cooler model to cases, it will be a major price disruption for the case industry. 

Silverstone

SilverStone FLP02

Up next: SilverStone’s FLP02 gets our next spot in this round-up. The retro-themed case is an actual real attempt at a modern computer case, not just some meme, while preserving aspects of cases from the late 80s and early 90s. Its clearest downside is limited cooling capabilities, with the clearest upside being the reason it has limitations in cooling: It’s true to the era while modernizing compatibility. The SilverStone FLP02 is a looks-first case, but not in the usual way. 

The case builds upon Silverstone’s FLP01 smaller form factor case, which was originally an April Fool’s joke, and deploys a functional retro theming: The front panel features 5.25” bay covers that resemble floppy drives and include functional levers for removal. The bays can be used as typical. Below these molded covers, there’s a functional I/O panel with a power switch and reset button, both controllable by the key lock which prevents accidental usage, which is more of a call-back to the old days. With the key in the unlocked position, the switches can be used as normal power/reset buttons. There’s also a Turbo Button, which controls fan speed. In theory, someone crafty could rewire it for use with something else. Above the stack of 5.25” bay covers is a covered set of modern USB and 3.5mm I/O for audio.

The box doesn’t have a ton of airflow. The bottom-front of the case has largely blocked-off intake and support for a fan below the drive cages is really the main place you’re bringing air in. Have no illusions: This will be a poor performer in our thermal benchmarking compared to other cases and that’s the trade-off they’ve chosen, so the objective would be to configure the build in a way where cooling can brute force past restrictive panels. The front panel supports two 120mm fans, depending on drive layout, the top supports 3x 120 or 2x 140 fans, the rear can fit a 120 or 140.

The top panel is also relatively low porosity while still allowing more air movement than the cases this is inspired by. The top can accommodate liquid cooling radiators, including the 360 shown installed. This is the type of case where you’d probably want to use a liquid cooler to help overcome limitations of airflow.

Internally, the tooling for the FLP02 is the same as SilverStone’s existing series of SETA Q1, H1, and D1 series cases. 

SilverStone expects to sell the case for 200 EUR. US pricing was in flux due to variable tariffs, with an expectation of $220 USD pricing.

LD05

The company also had more contemporary cases, like the LD05 fishtank case. The LD05 has heavily ventilated lower panels and a ventilated side panel to get air into the system. This is more of a traditional design by today’s standards. SilverStone plans to ship it with 3x 120 ARGB fans included and wants to hit $100, depending on tariffs, for a budget-focused airflow case with the glass look to it.

Cooler Master

Cooler Master MF Cases

Cooler Master’s back in it this year. The company had a ton of cases. We’ll focus on the modularity offered by the MF series and will recap the others at the end of the section.

For the MF series, which we’ve decided means “Motherf*ckin,” Cooler Master has the MF600, MF500, and MF400 cases as pre-configured options of an otherwise totally modular approach to case design. The MF series will use a set of 8 corners and 12 columns, meaning that each case starts as a box of parts that can get screwed together into a case. These columns and corners will couple with a rails system internally to build the motherboard tray, allowing the cases to be reconfigured into nearly any layout. That includes inverted, mirrored or flipped, standard ATX, and also different form factors altogether.

Initially, Cooler Master plans to sell these as pre-configured, fully assembled cases by using the modular parts. In the future, the company wants to offer the ability for users to customize the build on a web interface, at which point the build instructions would go to Cooler Master’s new Los Angeles-based assembly team in the US.

As for what’s being sold sometime this year, the MF400 through 600 will be varying sizes and layouts. 

The MF600 is the largest of these, with 3x 140 fans and 1x 120 fan included. Price target is $200, tariffs notwithstanding. The MF600 has an all aluminum look to it, though uses a mix of materials for the chassis. Externally, Cooler Master has done well to blend the columns, corners, and panels to create something that has a less-gamer aesthetic to it. The front-to-back flow design is classic and should work well. Internally, the motherboard tray is basically a giant hole with some rails and slats across for support. This means a weaker tray structurally, but one which is more versatile (as shown in the reconfiguration with different orientations).

The pre-configured MF500 should be $165 and will have 2x 200mm fans and 1x 120mm fan, a much finer mesh front, and I/O on the bottom of the front panel. Going with the 2x 200s is a classic Cooler Master move that we’re looking forward to testing. 

The MF400 is micro-ATX, and so it’s smaller, with a lower price target at $150 for the same 2x 200 and 1x 120 configuration. It still uses 8 corners and 12 columns.

Cooler Master also debuted its new Cosmos cases, including a special edition variation with the NVIDIA DGX style front panel and another with ductwork for air cooling. We are currently critical of the special edition’s liquid cooling configuration and question how well it’ll work, though the size of the radiator should brute force performance (since it’s using 4x 180mm fans). It’s just that they’re blowing straight into a motherboard and wall. 

The company also showcased its “Elite” series of budget cases, featuring a tragedy of naming that doesn’t have much rhyme or reason for the model numbers. 

It also had a new Q500 Core following the Q500 series styling. The Q500 Core is supposed to be $60 to $70 and is made entirely of steel. It’ll include 3D print source files for modifications and can fit up to a 360mm radiator, but it’s not our focus today.

Hyte

Hyte X50

Hyte showcased its new X50 case, which is its most mechanically complicated product to manufacture to-date. The X50 uses a bubbly external look while attempting to be the highest-performing case on benchmark charts. Hyte uses a front panel that’s perforated all the way around the apex of the turn, leaving only a small strip at the mounting point for rigidity. The case also has louvered slats at the back, including for the PCIe slots, which add mechanical and manufacturing complexity but strengthen the chassis structure while improving airflow performance. Hyte noted that its intent, which we’ll test in our review, is to help project air away from the system, highlighting that there’s always focus on reducing intake impedance but noting that exhaust impedance is similarly important.

The louvered approach means that PCIe slot covers keep all of their original steel (rather than being removed like a typical slot cover), but the gaps are created by punching the steel outward and twisting at the joint. This keeps rigidity while theoretically reducing exhaust impedance.

The case is almost entirely steel. Internally, the power supply shroud is steel, the motherboard tray (as usual) is steel, and the walls are mostly steel. The floor and some connecting pieces are plastic, but its presence is overall mitigated.

Hyte has a few styles of feet for the X50, including what the company refers to as “paws” (shown as the rounded feet) on some color models, with bars for models like the white case.

The case can have either a laminated so-called “acoustic glass” side panel or a full-on mesh panel that’s focused on cooling performance. 

The top-mounted PSU shroud will help by enabling more bottom intake by getting the PSU out of the way, in addition to using the power supply as another fan to help guide air through the system. With a fully mesh panel, this should also help bring air into the computer from outside.

We’ll see how the case does in our review, but from a manufacturing and engineering standpoint, it already gets credit for overcoming challenges with going as mesh-heavy as the case is. You can learn more in our interview with Product Director Rob Teller in the X50 coverage from Computex. We spend a lot of time talking about Hyte’s tens of thousands of dollars of failed samples, where the company walked us through all the trial-and-error of front panels before it finally figured out how to manufacture the panel the company wanted. The case should be priced for $120 with mesh and $150 with glass pre-tariff.

Lian Li

Lian Li had a relatively large breakthrough this year with its ongoing attempts to figure out how to embed fans in glass front panels. This has historically been challenging since it results in lower yields and broken glass, or in the worst case, just less surface area available for intake since a larger border has to remain for structural reasons.

The Lian Li Lancool 217 Infinity and Lancool 4 cases both make use of this new approach to fans-in-glass, effectively mixing mesh grates in front of the fans with the tempered glass look.

The Lancool 217 Infinity is a Lancool 217 (check out our review here) including all of the tooling for the case internals. The only exception where tooling changed was to the front panel, enabling the infinity mirror effect with LEDs and the support for mounting the glass panel. The only other change is to IO, where Lian Li made it optionally mountable to the top or bottom side. The case will ship with 2x 170mm front fans in the glass and one rear-mounted fan. It should ship at $120.

The Lancool 4 is more complicated and is entirely new tooling. The case still uses the 4-door approach that the Lancool series has become known for, so the left side features a large sheet of glass resting on top of a mesh plate that opens separately. The mesh plate allows intake through fans mounted in the bottom of the case (or just the GPU), with lower panel side mounting available for 120mm fans. The panels open with a button release mechanism to allow them to separately lock. The right side also features glass and steel, with a clear line of sight through the other side of the front of the case. A cable cover door can be screwed down to hide the cable management.

A pogo pin setup allows the front panel to transfer power without use of a cable, followed by a mix of painted glass and plastic covers to hide cables daisy chaining the fans. Lian Li is considering including 3x 140x30mm front fans and 3x 120x25 side fans, with a pricing target at $130 including all 6 of these fans. This would be extremely competitive if they can do it. Lian Li has committed on camera with us to a 5-year warranty for the fans.

Lian Li had a few honorable mentions at the show: Its O11 Mini V2 made an appearance and manages to cram an ATX power supply into the case by punching out space in the side panel. The Mini V2 should be $90 without fans and $100 with 5x 120 fans. The Dan Case B4 was also an interesting showing, mostly for its ability to attach feet and switch to a much higher volume vertical orientation. It makes use of the space provided by the feet by also including a radiator extension chamber to support a 360mm radiator on the side. More interestingly to us, the Vector 100 and Vector 100 Mini cases are extremely cheap. The Vector 100 Mini micro-ATX case is intended to sell for $45 without fans, making it a direct competitor to Thermalright’s new mATX case. 

Antec x Noctua

Antec and Noctua are up next in a collaboration. The companies are working together to manufacture an alternative to the Antec Flux Pro except with Noctua fans. The Flux Pro was already a chart-topper in our case benchmarks and reviews and has been a high performer, so Antec isn’t changing much beyond colors and what fans are included.

The companies will do a like-for-like swap of 6 Noctua fans in place of the 6 Antec fans, switching to 4x 140mm NF-A14 G2 fans and 2x 120mm NF-A12 G2 fans for the shroud top. 

The case price is still being finalized, but it’ll be expensive. We’d expect to see this fall in the range of the $300s to $400s somewhere, as the case itself is typically around $180 before the Noctua fans.

Most of the time was spent on coloring the brown panels and grommets to match the fans as closely as possible.

Antec also had some other stuff, like the company’s new Antec 900, which is based on the case of the same name from decades ago.

The case had 2 variants. One of them included 2x200mm Noctua fans at the front. 

HAVN BF360

We toured the HAVN testing lab in Taiwan to look at the company’s new BF360 case, following-up the HS420 that we previously reviewed overall positively. In addition to a 40+ page presentation from its thermal engineer detailing all the various testing performed to prepare the new case and fans for launch, we also got a look at the new BF360 and its fans. We appreciated the time the company spent to demonstrate all of its testing and engineering, as most companies don’t make thermal engineers readily available.

HAVN’s new BF360 aims to be highly competitive for case thermals and has dedicated a significant amount of that toward fine-tuning the fans. We’ll see how it does in testing later in the year, of course. The case will use 2x 180mm fans at 40mm thickness in the front, helping with higher static pressure performance. In testing, HAVN experimented with positioning these front fans higher versus lower on the front panel, settling to mostly bias them slightly up in the case. This should help push more air straight into the GPU, which gets further tuning from a “ramp” shaped at the front of the PSU shroud. HAVN tested numerous shroud ramp types and shapes, finding ultimately that a wide, relatively modestly angled ramp provided the best performance with the fewest acoustic trade-offs.

The panels are heavy-duty and designed with similar attention to detail as the HS420. The case has tuned placement of the structural struts in the panels to reduce impedance to flow, with wide enough top mounting to support more 180mm fans without additional fan mount rail obstructions if going the larger route. 

HAVN has brought over smaller attention to detail embellishments on this case from the HS 420, including molded text in the plastic cable routing channels to guide novice users to potentially optimal routing pathways. For looks, HAVN is going for white and black, but with a faked stone-looking front panel. Pulling that front panel reveals the steel plate above the top 180mm fan, serving to prevent re-circulation and force air intake through the ideal channels.

For the fans, HAVN experimented with fans up to 52mm thick, but ultimately settled on 40mm thick options for a balance of thickness and performance. All of HAVN’s new fans use larger bearings, which it says helps to stabilize the blade during rotation. HAVN also has notched the leading edge of the blades to help capture and force air through the blades, although we’d need to see A/B testing to know how much that really matters.

Corsair

Corsair’s Computex showing this year was much stronger than some of its prior years. The company seems to be pushing hard after the relatively good reception of its FRAME 4000D cases and is expanding the scope of the FRAME series, but also making some radical cooling changes to its new cases.

Corsair showed its new FRAME 5000D with LCD panel, its Air 5400 with effectively three chambers that completely isolate front radiator air from the rest of the system, and it had a prototype FRAME 4000D with a power board from Singularity PCs.

The FRAME 5000D is a larger 4000D and we’ll likely test it soon enough, so we’ll skip that one and focus on the most unique of these.

The Corsair Air 5400 uses a separate chamber for a front-mounted radiator, which involves running the tubes across effectively shop brush bristles for tube routing. This means that the radiator, likely used for the CPU cooler, would pull air in externally and then propel it out of the case immediately by following an interior curved wall. The air never gets into the main chamber, which means it doesn’t increase local ambient temperature. Likewise, as a downside, this means less airflow over ignored components like the VRM or system memory. 

The bottom of the case uses a duct to guide air straight in from bottom intake, then points it straight at the GPU. Corsair claims that its A/B testing of this ductwork creates about a 1-2 degree improvement in GPU thermals versus testing without it. Likewise, there’s another top-mounted duct that could encase top fans to provide some cooling to the rest of the motherboard, although flow-through cooling from a GPU would also push air into the memory. It’ll be warmed, but that’s better than no airflow.

The rear can technically fit a 120mm fan with an adapter, but there’s no real reason to mount one. It’ll blow nearly half the air straight into a curved glass wall, potentially causing noise issues but definitely limiting thermal benefits.

Overall, the case is a riskier attempt at a new design that we don’t often see from Corsair. We’re looking forward to thermal testing on it.

The FRAME 4000D Prototype is also worth showing here: The power board at the back doesn’t provide any logging functionality (like you might find with an Elmor Labs Benchtable), but does offer cable routing by funneling all the connectors through a rear-mounted PCB. 

Like everyone else, they had other cases present, such as an open frame case, but we’ll point you toward our Computex news coverage for that.

Thermaltake

Thermaltake also had a lot at the show. For cases, its IX700 enclosure was being used in an immersion cooling system, which was mostly just cool to see. 

The more consumer-focused cases for our audience would include the View 390 Air, the TR200, and the TR300.

The TR200 and TR300 introduce larger versions of the mini-ITX TR100, just with micro-ATX support in one and ATX support in the other. Micro-ATX seems to be taking off more this year in the case market.

The View 390 Air uses a curved tempered glass panel around the top and side, with options for up to 200mm fans at the front. Thermaltake hasn’t yet finalized the stock fan configuration, but has finalized the price: It’s trying to hit $150 pre-tariff and the company thinks it can include 2 fans at that price. They mentioned to us options of either 2x 200s at the front or 2x 120s at the back or side. We’d favor the 2x 200s, mostly because users with liquid coolers will already be getting 120s, and 120s are also more common just in bins of parts from seasoned PC builders.

The case can fit fans along the right side panel as well, with 2x 120 rear exhaust fans available optionally at the back. Two can fit here because the optional screen location, found above the motherboard tray, makes the case taller and provides the clearance for a second fan.

The front panel design uses a brick pattern with a high porosity, which might actually make this fairly competitive thermally, depending on the fan configuration.

Phanteks

Phanteks was also present at the show. Phanteks had the budget-focused G370A ATX case and its XT M3 micro-ATX case. The G370A makes compromises to hit a price target of $60 while including 3x 120 RGB M25 fans. Phanteks described it as a smaller version of the G400 case. The case can fit SSI-EEB boards, though they’d block all the cable management routing aside from the highest pass-throughs, and is otherwise about as standard and plain as a case can be. The goal is price on this one.

You can learn more about the XT M3 in our Phanteks Computex coverage.

Tryx

Tryx was also present at Computex. The new Flova case is currently a concept, but Tryx is experimenting with trying to get a crossflow fan integrated with axial fans in the case. The idea would be to shove a crossflow (or transverse) fan in the space that could traditionally be used for larger front fans, which would then provide a more even, laminar flow along the top edge of the GPU and nearest the glass. Crossflow fans aren’t necessarily the best at this type of cooling, but could definitely be tuned to be competitive with enough research and care. We saw it work in the Meshless AIO mini-ITX case previously.

For now, this is an experiment that we’re excited about because we want to test something different. We have an animation showing how these work in our Meshless AIO case video review, in case you want to learn more of the science.

Montech

As for Montech, the company had a ton of cases present and will be launching them over the next year or so, with some out in Q2 2026.

For this article, we’ll just keep it short and focus on the cheapest cases from Montech that are coming out the soonest, as the others are all still being finalized:

The X5 and X5M are Montech’s newest budget-focused cases. The case is supposed to be $60 for the micro-ATX X5M and $70-$75 on the X5 ATX case. These cases use a wavy, ventilated mesh front panel. The X5 intends to include 3x 140 fans and 1x 120 stock, with an optional 2x 120 fans for the top of the shroud (which would have limited benefit due to the panel styling). The $60 X5M will include 4x 120 fans.

In Win

In Win’s cases were mostly too early in development to get into detail on. The company didn’t have prices or fan configurations ready, so we’ll skip all of those until they’re closer to ready. 

The one we can close on though is In Win’s Chronomancy, which was its 40-year anniversary case design. It’s not really meant to be sold. They expect to make around 40 units, fittingly, but it’s just kind of cool.

The case uses an IR wand with gestures to open the exterior aluminum shell, close it, open the other chamber, or adjust the volume level of various music tracks baked into the case with its included speaker. Manufacturing the case is a nightmare, using a large and thick sheet of acrylic that gets laser engraved and then slowly bent. The aluminum panels also require bending, with the front using a stainless steel and the base using large aluminum pillars.

Inside, the Chronomancy does actually hold a computer, but it’s obviously secondary to the design.

We take a look at ID-Cooling’s new air and liquid coolers, which aim to balance quality and value with their designs

The Highlights

• ID-Cooling’s A720 AD and A720 TD represent the company’s attempt to fix its acoustic problems while being affordable
• ID Cooling has a range of liquid coolers from low-end to high-end starting around $80 to $100 for 360mm coolers
• The company’s SL360 V2 Plus cooler interestingly uses a larger radiator than it does fans

Table of Contents

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Intro

We visited ID-Cooling’s booth at Computex 2025 and the company showed off scented paste…and a bunch of coolers.

Looking at the company’s product at the trade show, we found ID-Cooling’s products to be more expensive than Thermalright's, but they’re cheaper than others in the market. This places them somewhere in the middle but the company is trying to keep quality levels in focus for some of their designs.

Editor's note: This was originally published on May 24, 2025 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

Credits

Host

Steve Burke

Camera, Video Editing

Mike Gaglione
Vitalii Makhnovets

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

A720 AD 

ID-Cooling has updated its A720. It’s calling it the A720 AD and it’s targeting the higher-end market but still trying to be affordable at around $70. It represents a serious overhaul from the A720 that we’ve tested before, which was one of the top performers for its price. It was competitive with Noctua and was cheaper. The updated A720 now has pogo pins to deliver power to the fan. This means the fan doesn’t have a cable. 

ID-Cooling has also soldered the finstack to the heatpipes. This is something a couple companies are doing now. Some of them claim that this offers no performance improvement whereas others do claim a performance uplift. ID-Cooling says that, in a like-for-like scenario comparing the old A720 with the new one, the company is seeing about a 2 degree improvement at 280 watts. 

The A720 AD uses PBT fans. The most expensive fans typically use LCP, which uses a liquid crystal material in the middle for the blades. Sometimes they’ll do LCP for the inner and the outer part of the fan. This is what Noctua has done for its super expensive fans where the company is trying to get the tip-to-frame clearance as small as possible, hitting clearance numbers like .6mm or .8mm. This low of a clearance requires LCP or metal. ID-Cooling is using PBT, which helps with the price. The company tells us it’s supposed to be 30% fiberglass reinforced, which helps maintain the rigidity as the fan blades stretch towards the inner walls of the frame over time. 

620 AD

We tested ID-Cooling’s 620 in the past as well. It competed pretty closely with ID-Cooling’s older AK620, but the company showed off its new 620 AD. Like the A720 AD, the company is soldering the fin stack to the heatpipes so there’s some improvement from that and it also moves to a newer fan design. 

We asked ID-Cooling what is the biggest thing it’s trying to change with its revised coolers, and the company told us acoustics is the number 1 complaint it got. So the company has reshaped its blades to feature a more gradual curve to mitigate this issue. ID-Cooling has also changed the blade angle at the hub. We aim to test all of this as soon as it becomes available. It will be $55 and the company hasn’t announced a release date yet. We imagine it might come out around Q4. 

The 620AD offers 3 different levels for the RAM clearance on the front, which can be adjusted and clipped in. 

The outside fan is 28mm and the inside fan is 30mm. This allows the cooler to maintain a higher static pressure through the fin stack, especially with the dual-tower fin stacks. 

410 TD 

ID-Cooling already has its 410 series of coolers, but the company showed off its 410 TD at Computex. The TD stands for temperature display. This does increase the price a little and will supposedly make the 410 TD a $35 cooler.  It has a temperature digital display that shows the CPU temp. The finstack thickness has also changed with the TD model moving to 50mm. The heatpipes are all using a composite powder and groove style. 

It’s also made changes to the cold plate where ID-Cooling is trying to push the 4 heatpipes as close together as possible. It’s not as impressive as we saw at Scythe’s Computex booth, where Scythe basically conjoined them all into one direct touch pad, but they’re getting closer.  

ID-Cooling Liquid Coolers

ID-Cooling showed off a bunch of liquid coolers at Computex 2025, though not as much as at Thermalright’s booth.

SL 360 V2+

One of the liquid coolers, the SL 360 V2+,  immediately jumped out at us because its fans are a different width than the radiator. That’s abnormal. The fans are 120mm but the radiator measures 140mm wide and it was done to incorporate LED lights on the sides of the fans. 

To compensate for the smaller fans, ID-Cooling has added 2 water channels. ID-Cooling also added more liquid. Between the tank and the extra channels, it ends up with 36g more liquid. The propylene glycol percentage is around 15%. The reason that’s important is that the more distilled water there is in the loops, the better the cooling performance is. Propylene glycol helps with things like cold storage, transit, freight, and cold temperatures, but going too high with that compromises performance. 15% is a little on the lower end, which is a good thing for performance. The fans are AP120s and are 28mm thick. ID-Cooling tells us the cooler will have a 6-year warranty and that the surface area has been increased by about 15% compared to traditional 360 setups due to the size change. The cooler is supposed to be $190 when it comes out. 

Unfortunately, the cooler doesn’t come with an offset bracket, and we’ve requested that ID-Cooling include one. 

ID-Cooling informed us that there’s a .5mm gap between the bottom of the microfins and the bottom of the cold plate. Lian Li is experimenting with .3. The downside to that, or  something smaller, is there could be more flex/more weakness. The upside is the performance will be better because you’re getting the liquid and the microfins closer to the heat source, which is the CPU IHS.  

FX 360 TD Black  

At $80, the FX 360 TD Black is the cheapest liquid cooler ID-Cooling showed off. It offers a 360mm cooling setup that’s 27mm thick, which is standard. 

With an LCD screen, it’s $90. And it’s a 240x240 screen. 

DX 360

The company’s DX 360 liquid cooler offers a thicker 38mm radiator. It’s supposed to be $120 with its 2.8-inch LCD screen. Launch is TBD. 

DX 360 GDL 

We saw a prototype of the DX 360 GDL at the show. The key thing about this liquid cooler is that it has very short 100mm-length tubes. They go out from the block and go right into the radiator. The downside to this design is that it forces you to put your radiator at the top, which can be problematic in a super-tall case. The benefit to this design is that it looks clean.

ID-Cooling has also added 82 grams of additional liquid by changing the radiator size, which is 130mm wide and has 120mm fans that are 27mm thick. 

Its cap is also magnetic and pulls right off, which exposes the top of the tubes and the rest of the cooler’s block.

We take a look at Thermaltake’s full immersion cooling setup and several new cases that include the View 390 Air, TR200, TR300, and more

The Highlights

• Thermaltake’s full immersion cooling setup uses liquid and comically large hoses coupled with a massive radiator system
• Thermaltake’s upcoming View 390 Air case looks promising and offers a curved glass side panel
• The company’s TR200 and TR300 are budget friendly cases that include a TFT display panel on the front
• Thermaltake’s Mine Cube looks very reminiscent of another popular IP and offers a cooler block with 4 screens

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

Intro

We visited Thermaltake’s booth at Computex 2025 and the company showed off its Immersion Cooling system, View 390 Air case, “Minecube” cooler, and TR200/TR300 cases.

Editor's note: This was originally published on May 20, 2025 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

Credits

Host

Steve Burke

Camera, Video Editing

Mike Gaglione
Vitalii Makhnovets

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

Immersion Cooling

At the show floor, the company showed off a setup that offers 50 liters of “immersion cooling” within their new IX700 case. Immersion cooling means that the system is in liquid. The liquid is PA2, which is one of the more economical solutions, but is still expensive. Thermaltake tells us it's between $20 to $30 per liter.

The liquid is piped through 2 gigantic pipes, which Thermaltake tells us is rated for 20 bar. That’s insane. It then connects to a massive 4-radiator system. Overall, it’s a showcase for an enterprise solution, but it’s super cool. 

The PC had its CPU, an Intel Xeon w9-3495X, and GPU both at 100% load. CPU core temperature clocked in at about 60 degrees C and the GPU was about 64 degrees C. We estimate that the room the computer was in felt about 23 degrees C. 

The system is running 4 pumps and 4 radiators using a 4x420mm setup that are 64mm thick. Thermaltake is thinking that its immersion cooling setup will be a build-to-order enterprise solution. Taking a closer look at the radiators, they felt warm when we put our hands next to them.  

The system uses dielectric fluid, which means it’s non conductive. 

The hoses for the system seem overkill and we don’t know what industry they come from. 

View 390 Air

The View 390 Air is a $150 case. The company is thinking about including 2 fans for that price, but the company is still deciding between offering 2 fans in the front or in the back. In our opinion, Thermaltake should provide the 2x200mm fans in the front as users are less likely to already have those.   

The case’s glass side panel provides a solid wall all the way around the case. The glass measures 4-5mm thick, which is very large glass. Interestingly, closing off the top panel can work better for CPU thermals sometimes. The reason is that when you push air in, it’s not able to escape through the top.   

There is a screen that’s mounted above the motherboard, which is optional. If you don’t buy the screen version, there’s just a steel plate there instead. 

The case has spots for 3 sunken 120mm fans at the bottom and room for 3 fans on the side. We do like seeing the option for 2 fans in the back when there’s room for it, but it does make the case taller.   

TR100

The company showed off several different color SKUs of the TR100, which is a case that’s already out on the market. 

TR200 and TR300

Thermaltake also showed off its TR200 micro-ATX case. It’s supposed to be $80.

The TR300, meanwhile, is a $100 case. 

Neither case has a riser, which means the GPU is normally installed. Both cases use a newer TFT display panel on the front, which Thermaltake says offers better brightness and sharper resolution than their prior panels. 

The company also showed off a prototype wood front panel. 

Looking inside the TR300, we can see a lot of Yeston-inspired marketing material on the pump block. In addition, the case also has a closed-off side near its front that tries to obscure the power supply and its cables because the PSU is mounted to the front and is rotated on its side. Unfortunately, this design does limit options for intake fans in the front. The case relies on bottom intake fans and some on the side. Again, unfortunately, the bottom of the TR300 is not that elevated though the TR200 does have more room to breathe, which we liked seeing. 

Thermaltake is looking at a Q3 launch for both cases. 

Mine Cube

The font and aesthetics of the Mine Cube might look familiar, but is legally distinct... The Mine Cube is a cooler block with 4-sided screens, which includes the top and 3 sides. It sits on top of a VRM fan and RAM fan. 

One feedback we offered was that there was no vent on the north side to allow air to hit the VRM from this angle.

Internally, the block cover has some slats. The unit we saw only was able to get in air through one side, but we looked at a really early prototype. Users can orient the Mine Cube to whatever position they want. 

There’s a couple challenges for Thermaltake to overcome here. The first of which involves software, particularly if you want to try and link the screens in any way. The unit we saw at Computex had a character moving from one screen to the next. The other main challenge pertains to cost, especially as it comes to controlling the screens. To address this, Thermaltake has gone to a single IC to control all 4 screens. Regardless, the 360mm model, which is the only one we know of at the moment, still ends up around $350. When we asked them about the technological challenges of trying to drive 4 screens through a liquid cooler, the company said it was “not making it $600,” which is a totally valid answer. 

Thermaltake is targeting an August release for the Mine Cube. 

Project Edge

Thermaltake also showed off an early prototype of its Project Edge set of fans, which offers a series of progressing screens. The company thinks this is where the future of fans might be. To add some context here, Lian Li makes a bunch of money selling fans with LCDs on them. Now the direction might be LCDs on the side of fans.