I’ve seen every PC case that Computex has to offer and this new Havn chassis is my top pick thanks to its abnormally large fans, front grille and airflow optimisation

This year’s Computex tech show in Taipei was filled with new and lavishly designed PC cases. Some big, some small, some in the shape of cats with swords from popular videogames. Yet one stood out to me more than most, and that’s the Havn BF 360.

Available in black and white, Havn has stuck with a design not that dissimilar to the Havn HS 420, which was the brand’s first case and our pick for the best PC case right now. That’s a good start, with the BF 360 retaining a lot of what I liked about the bigger model: chunky cable management channels, and room for plenty of fans. Big ones.

On that last point, there’s room inside the BF 360 for case fans up to 180 mm in size. Havn will sell this case with or without fans, but the former might be the way to go, as you’ll be getting a set of two of Havn’s own H Series 180 mm fans and a 140 mm fan in the rear.

These are all of Havn’s own design, and the largest, the 180 mm fan, is 40 mm thick. Havn says that makes for the longest fluid dynamic bearing in the biz, which aids in stability and durability, but all I can say after having held one at Computex is that it’s a real chunky lad.

You can fit four of these 180 mm fans in the BF 360: two in the front, two in the top. Or various configurations of smaller fans, including space for two 360 mm radiators.

Those front fans should generate heaps of airflow and relatively low RPMs versus smaller units, with the BF 360 design aiding airflow with a sloped PSU shroud. It slopes towards the front of the case, which allows for air from the lower of the two front fans to be scooped up and thrown right at your graphics card. There’s reportedly been quite a bit of trial and error to nail the correct shape of this well and here’s hoping all that makes for a cool-running PC at the end of the day.

“So it basically directs all of the airflow to the GPU,” says Steven Levitt from Pro Gamers Group, the company that created Havn. “We’ve noticed other cases using this sort of method that’s a bit similar, but we’ve tested this against all of the high airflow cases on the market, and we’re number one for CPU and GPU performance. That’s in our own testing. It’s a bit biased, obviously, coming from us, but we’ve done a lot of work to really try and try and make this amazing.”

I do have one minor complaint about the design of this case: the backside panel is a bit boring, compared to the Havn HS 420.

I prefer the striped look which the HS 420 offers, to allow air to travel through fans or a radiator mounted to the side of the motherboard. It feels like a distinctly Havn appearance, one notably lacking from the bland, flat panel on the BF 360. I suppose something has to give on this presumably more affordable case.

Underneath sits a single fan controller, one fewer than the HS 420, though the BF 360 is a lot smaller and doesn’t need the coverage quite as much. There’s also room for HDD and SSDs in the back.

I asked Havn for a price estimate and I was told it’s aiming for under the HS 420, but that it’s still determining the actual cost. A ballpark figure has it only marginally cheaper at around the £200 mark, but it might not end up that way, we’ll have to wait and see.

There is one more case at Computex with large front fans. Tryx’s Luca Air has two 200 mm fans loaded into the front, which are only slightly thinner than Havn’s 180 mm fans at 38 mm. So maybe these sorts of large fans will become a bit of a trend in coming years.