Gigabyte’s Project Stealth PC returns to eradicate cable management

Sep 25, 2023

CES 2023 is where imagination gets to run wild—where vendors get to show off their engineering chops in cool and quirky ways. But as fun as stuff like CyberPowerPC's breathing PC case is, it doesn't necessarily speak to common problems faced in the real world. For example, cable management. Just keeping everything relatively neat takes time, and if you try to make it look good, the effort can burn literal hours.

Last May, Gigabyte partnered with Maingear to address this issue by getting rid of cables in the main compartment of their debut Project Stealth case and components. Yes, all of them. It wasn't done through trickery (that is, clever cable routing)—Project Stealth made some radical (and dare we say smart) changes to the components themselves. Like moving all those pesky cable headers moved to the back of the parts.

As frequent PC builders, the concept seemed genius to us. Such a seemingly simple design change makes for a huge impact on aesthetics build time. Even if you’re not aiming for the sleekest build, cable management is still necessary; you avoid situations like wires blocking airflow or getting chewed by fans. But the internet didn't agree. There was a huge problem: The case had no airflow. By their standards, anyway.

Well, y’all can rest easy now, because Gigabyte gave you what you wanted. At CES 2023, they unveiled version 2.0 of Project Stealth—and it has a mesh front.

If you missed the Project Stealth coverage the first time around, you can see both that perforated front panel and a fresh tour of the PC's innards, which includes a close view of the back of the motherboard and the reversed position of the connectors. You know what other problem this concept improves? Dealing with front panel pins.

The fun part is that you can actually get your hands on this PC—you can buy a version with a case, a Z690 motherboard, and an RTX 3070 for about $1,000. Hopefully this takes off; we’d love to see more vendors hopping on board with component options, especially AM5 ones. And no, internet, it's not cute to say that people won't see cables if they buy a case with two solid side panels.

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Alaina Yee is PCWorld's resident bargain hunter—when she's not covering PC building, computer components, mini-PCs, and more, she's scouring for the best tech deals. Previously her work has appeared in PC Gamer, IGN, Maximum PC, and Official Xbox Magazine. You can find her on Twitter at @morphingball.