Aerocool Tomahawk PC case

This is the Aerocool Tomahawk, a PC case generally available in many places worldwide for around $55/£35.

The Tomahawk is a decent illustration of what to expect from a budget PC case. It's a mid-tower case with a boxy frame, a windowed side panel, a couple of simple fans, and some rough edges. Generally, though, it offers wide-ranging compatibility with modern PC components.

You may think you can't ask more of a budget case than a standardised home for your parts, but in testing a number of similarly priced budget cases today, I did find the Tomahawk's somewhat old-fashioned layout to be a bane on temperatures and likely not an ideal configuration for long-term use.

The Tomahawk has no top fan vents or mounts, insteading offering a spot for a PSU up top. This is something you might still see in a cheaper workstation, but rarely nowadays in a gaming PC. Since there are no vents on the top of the case, the PSU must be orientated in such a way to suck in air from the inside the case and exhaust it out the rear vent on the unit. That means hot air generated by the CPU, GPU, VRM, and other components will travel past your PSU's internal components, which may lead to these parts heating up more than usual, but more importantly does appear to lead to hotter temperatures for other key components.

The Tomahawk ran our Ryzen 5 5600X CPU hotter than most other budget cases in my testing. Unfortunately, due to the layout of the case and the Molex-powered fans, the speed of which cannot be adjusted, there's not much that can be done immediately to rectify the higher CPU temperatures. You may, however, find that a CPU with a lower power consumption may fare better in this case, and of course you can always replace the fans down the line.

Cheap case airflow test

The main ingredient for an impressive PC case is airflow, but you'd be surprised by just how many case designs don't get this quite right. Ideally, we want our case to draw in cool air from a handful of high flow intake fans at the front, over our PC's components, then out the exhaust. Cheap cases, however, don't always come with the ideal number of fans for this optimal setup, so it's extra important to find one that is smartly designed to work with limited cooling potential. 

To test the thermal properties of these six cheap cases, I built a PC into each of them. Then I ran a handful of benchmarks to put the CPU and GPU under day-to-day stress and collated the average results into this graph.

The Tomahawk may offer only Molex-powered fans but at least it has two. These come as standard mounted in the front and rear. This configuration does help in terms of graphics card temperature, with the dual-fan RTX 3060 I've been using for testing hitting a maximum temperature of 79°C. That's somewhere in the middle of the pack versus other cases I've tested.

These fans also light up, which does make for a more interesting-looking case with the windowed side panel on the Tomahawk. This is only a Perspex side panel, however, which I suppose isn't all that surprising considering the price of this case, but actually a few other cases in this price range do come with glass ones. Surprising, I know.

There are other cases that perform better, offer more options, and are still just as cheap as the Tomahawk. I'd actually recommend the Aerocool Zauron from my testing, as this case from the company delivers that same affordability but without the old-fashioned and restrictive layout.

Our group test: A budget PC case is a great way to trim costs on your next PC build, yet many of the brands we're used to seeing in the top case round-ups aren't anywhere near cheap enough for what we're after. That's why I asked our friends at Overclockers UK if it would lend us its cheapest cases to see which is worth your small pile of coins, and of the seven cases they sent my way, I made my conclusions.