If you’ve been looking to build or buy a new gaming PC, chances are you’ve come across the many “fish tank” desktop designs that look more or less the same. Yes, things all started with the Lian Li O11 Dynamic years ago and today, there are numerous copies.
Is change coming later this year? Well, there’s good (and bad) news from the Computex 2025 showfloor, as PC makers showed off their latest designs at the yearly Taiwanese technology show in Taipei last week. Think more wood, video screens and even retro beige plastic harking back to the 1980s.
Let’s start with the wood theme. Made popular of late by PC case maker Fractal Design, through its North and Terra cases, wood looks to be coming to more PC cases in 2025.
Top on my list at Computex this year is the Antec Flux Pro “Noctua Edition” packed with Noctua’s trademark brown and beige fans. Yes, the colours go so perfectly together you wonder why nobody had thought of it earlier.
The Antec chassis itself has wood accents at the front which are not overly retro in their callout to the 1970s but the brown theme is unmistakable. It helps to have Noctua’s high-performing yet quiet fans, of course.
Or, if you choose to, you can also pop in Noctua’s new all-in-one closed-loop liquid cooler for your CPU to complete the look.
It’s not as hardcore as a fully customised wooden PC case but if you’re pivoting to the wood look in your next PC, this Antec x Noctua chassis is worth looking out for.
Actually, you know what looks good with such a case? An Asus ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5080 Doom Edition graphics card that sports the latest Doom artwork and an additional matte green fan on the the flip side.
The military green of the fans and brown finish would complete the look on the Antec x Noctua case. Or any other wood-themed case, say, from Deepcool or Be Quiet, which both came up with neat looking chassis for your next PC.
Wood is something different from the RGB bling common in many fish tank cases today. That said, these transparent cases are not going away, to be sure. Walk through Computex 2025 this year and you’d be overwhelmed by the many glass-based designs. Curved glass? Check. RGB overload? Got it!
For better or worse, one thing that is sure to add to the bling is clear, sharp, high-resolution screens in all the places you probably don’t need.
The Lian Li Lancool 207 Digital, for example, incorporates a 6-inch LCD at the front with a decent 720 x 1,600 resolution. Well, actually, that’s pretty decent for a display today.
Not to be outdone, Deepcool also showed off a case with a 5.5-inch LCD built in, plus a huge reservoir at the front, in its Genome III. It’s a huge case and relatively tidy, as Deepcool cases are today.
LCD screens are likely to pop up in many more places this year. You’d find a screen on AIO coolers to power supply units (PSUs) soon, whether you’d really need information like fan speed or CPU temperatures updated every second.
Why stop there, actually. Now you can even have full videos of your favourite anime or an image of your favourite pet, as seen on new AIOs with attractive curved screens, like with Lian Li’s Hydroshift II LCD Curved.
Yes, if you think the bling from the RGB lights isn’t enough for the fish tank PC sitting on your desk, get ready for these mini billboards trying to catch you eye all the time.
Among the glass-panel PC designs at Computex 2025, one interesting improvement I noticed was the integration of large fans neatly into the front glass panel, like on the Lian Li Lancool 217 INF.
Instead of a metal mesh at the front, the chassis incorporates two sizable 170mm fans on a mirror-finish glass front panel. This means you can have your sleek glass facade while bringing in cool air from the front.
This was one of the highlights at the Taiwanese case maker’s booth at Computex 2025 and you have to admit this offered a bit of the best of both worlds – some of the cooling efficiency of a mesh front panel and the prettiness of a glass finish.
Okay, the LED fans do make a PC look like a boombox or speaker but it’s not as bad as a lousy piece of furniture. This could be an interesting design that is copied in the months ahead.
Finally, if modern designs are too blasé for you, then a retro trip back to the 1980s and 1990s – the early days of the PC – might be what you need. I’m thinking of Silverstone’s rather ridiculous beige chassis called the FLP02.
Yes, actually, this is a followup to an earlier FLP01 retro case, which came on the back of an April Fool’s joke back in 2023. Apparently, there’s demand for this so Silverstone is back with a new design.
The FLP02, out later this year in the United States for a princely US$220, isn’t just recycled plastic from 40 years ago. It lets you pop in long modern graphics cards and even comes with a supporting brace to prevent it from slagging.
Cable management is also more well-thought-out than your old beige case. The bottom part of the Silverstone chassis comes with an enclosure that covers up your PSU and its cables so you get a neater look.
The PC build Silverstone showcased at Computex 2025 comes complete with round buttons and a rocket switch to power things up. Plus, a two-digit display that looks from decades ago, helps wind the clock back.
The PC even comes with dummy 5.25-inch floppy drive panels – you can’t slot diskettes in them but they look retro. Only thing I’d complain about is the number of panels.
Three is too much, as a friend pointed out to me. In the old days of MS-DOS, you typically only have A: and B: drives, since C: is the main hard disk. Plus, you only needed two drives to make copies of your favourite games and other programs. Take note, Silverstone!
