Building in the Thermaltake Tower 250 made me furious about one design flaw that could be easily solved — cramped cable cut-outs and inaccessible I/O

As I am sure many readers can relate, I heard the hallowed, somewhat daunting words that friends and loved ones say to the resident PC geek or tech enthusiast in their lives — "Can you make me a PC?"

Of course, I've done it dozens of times, but this was the first time that my wife, who regularly plays (or attempts to run) AAA games on a basic RTX 3050 gaming laptop, wanted something higher-end. I would figure out the components, and she could pick out a case, specifying other aesthetic frills she would like. It couldn't be a big, black, boring box, and it had to be an interesting color. My wife eventually settled on the Thermaltake Tower 250 in the eye-catching "Hydrangea Blue" colorway. The PC case is an evolution of the original Tower 100, which we reviewed in 2019.

Things began to come together, and being a resourceful sort, we managed to corral all of the components to build a (slightly larger than usual) ITX-based system.

This isn't a super-high-end build, sporting an AMD Ryzen 5 9600X and RTX 4080 Founders Edition GPU, which I had intended to use in a different build. With that, alongside a 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSD from Sabrent and 32GB of Klevv RAM, it is quite a performant system, which should easily run just about every modern AAA title without issue at 1440p.

Once the case arrived and we started the build process, I noticed something unusual. The Thermaltake Tower 250 rotates the motherboard 90 degrees, compared to a standard configuration. This allows for a vertically-placed GPU, a motherboard placed in the center, and then support for an all-in-one cooler's radiator on the right. This isn't an issue in itself, but it does cause the motherboard's I/O to be pointing to the top of the case, in addition to any GPU display cables.

Where for art thou, I/O

The top of the Thermaltake Tower 250 is quite crowded; there are two preinstalled exhaust fans, in addition to the front I/O panel of the case. There's also a cut-out for cables, in addition to around an inch of clearance next to the fan shroud for anything coming from the motherboard IO, which feeds into a hole for the plastic shroud that covers it, leading out of the case.

So, if you want to plug anything into your motherboard, you'll have to navigate a frustrating labyrinth of cut-outs every single time. Many people will set and forget their rear I/O, ports, and with two USB-A and a Type-C port at the front, many just won't need it. Since this PC uses Wi-Fi, routing the antenna through was very simple, and I added a handful of USB-C cables to be routed to the desk to have a couple of chargers, in case she needs to plug things in.

What I didn't anticipate was the sheer number of random cables my wife would want to plug into her system at any given time. With the front I/O already populated, plugging in USB devices became more difficult than it really should be. When factoring in the heft of a DisplayPort cable in addition to everything else, things got pretty crowded.

So, the process of taking the top of the case off and wrangling around inside to plug in devices continued. This slight inconvenience turned into annoyance, and I answered the repeated calls of "Can you plug this in please?" repeatedly for a whole week, until I buckled and bought a generic USB hub from Amazon.

You shouldn't really have to do that for the sake of convenience, especially when a motherboard has enough IO for everything. But now that the saga is over, it also highlights another design issue for the Thermaltake Tower 250.

Building cleanly still results in visible cable mess

To Thermaltake's credit, the Tower 250 is broadly well-designed and very simple to build inside, and it took less than an hour for me to assemble a full system, including an all-in-one cooler and RGB frills, which were listed as "mandatory" under my wife's requirements. The case has consistent and simple channels for almost everything, including support for a full-sized PSU. Cable channelling for the GPU is well-thought-out, meaning we hid the majority of a white 12V2x6 cable into a corner, which cannot be seen from most angles. With everything put together, it looked and ran well, until I realized that the I/O pointing out at the top can become a bit of an eyesore.

With several cables running out at the top, the effort put in elsewhere to hide cables so efficiently was seemingly for naught. Above the I/O, there's an inch or two of clearance where cables can be routed. The problem is that with the Hydrangea Blue colorway of the case, the internal metal sheets are white, so if you have any black cables, they stick out like a sore thumb. This is admittedly minor compared to my other grievance, but it also has a fairly simple solution.

If Thermaltake built a detachable shroud for this part of the Tower 250, which puts some effort into hiding the cabling, it would also allow for a larger cable routing channel through the rear, making it simpler to actually make use of the motherboard I/O, or offer a wider cut-out, which makes accessing the rear IO much more accessible. Adding more steps between allowing a user to make use of the features of the components within the system is a black mark on an otherwise well-designed and good-looking PC case.