Hyte Y60 PC case review

Want to show off your gaming PC? Do a little PC-related peacocking? The new Hyte Y60 chassis will do just that, with its wraparound tempered glass surround it puts your graphics card front and center so you can highlight the component you've spent way over the odds on.

Hyte is the sister company of PC building outfit, iBuyPower, and you can either bag the new chassis in its rawest, purest, empty form, or have it ready wrapped around some fine modern gaming components ready to play out of the box.

We've had a bright red version of the Hyte Y60 in the office for a little while now, and it's a lovely case to build into. I've been messing around with the Steam Deck a lot over the past month or so, and it was actually quite nice to jump into a classic PC build. I didn't even scrape too much skin off my knuckles jamming a fresh Alder Lake system into it.

I took the red theme to heart and plucked a couple of key Asus ROG components for my build: the ROG Strix B660-I Gaming Wi-Fi and the monstrous ROG Ryujin II 360 cooler. Slipping a Core i5 12400 CPU under that pump, jamming in some blingy Corsair DDR5, and the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition, completed my project.

In a surprisingly speedy manner, it has to be said. 

Removing the front and back panels gives you a huge amount of space to work in, and being able to mount a full 360mm chip chiller's radiator into the roof of the case, frees up a lot of wiggle room.

The Y60 also makes a vertical mount of your graphics card a doddle, with a robust riser cable that attaches to the chassis in two places to keep it and the GPU steady.

And it looks great, though it does have a certain aquarium/terrarium vibe to it. Still, I'm not averse to that, but actually sticking a lizard, much less a fish, into the case won't do good things for either animal or silicon. I once saw Gigabyte making a fish tank PC and that was a lot more trouble than it was worth. Though at least it kept the fish alive. Well, while I was there anyway.

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I've got my issues with the Y60, though. There are only two drive bays and, though I like the fact they'll cater for both 3.5- and 2.5-inch drives, that restriction meant when I was installing the big Asus chip chiller there was nowhere else to mount the fan controller. That meant, for all my sweet cable-tidying prowess, I had to leave the box dangling around the back of the chassis.

Though, mercifully, the compartmental nature of the design hides all manner of cabling sins behind the motherboard backplate. Which, incidentally, has a massive cut out to allow you to mess around with the cooling mounts without removing the board from the case. Always very grateful for that.

I will also say the distance between the motherboard and vertical mounting point of a 240mm radiator on the back of the case feels like a stretch for a lot of AIO coolers. The tubing is going to be pulled tight trying to plumb into the bottom of the rad.

The Hyte Y60 feels very much like the premium Corsair chassis it's obviously got in its sights, which is a definite positive. But with a $200 price tag, it sits very much in the same "ouch, that's expensive" ballpark. 

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It's got a focus on aesthetics, but also general cooling, with a design created to enable continuous airflow around the case. So long as you use liquid cooling anyways, otherwise, you'll need to install another couple of intake fans if you're using a standard air cooler. There are already a couple of exhaust fans in the base of the case, specifically to draw air over the mounted graphics card, too.

Or you could go semi-naked and pull the tempered glass panels off entirely to leave a completely open-air chassis. How continental.

I think the Hyte Y60 is a great-looking PC case, that's a real pleasure to build into, too. I'm into the terrarium aesthetic, and there's space for even the beefiest of components. But, damn, at $200 it's expensive and with just a couple of hard drive bays, and no other mounting points, it just feels a little restrictive for such a premium-focused chassis.