Friends, fans, and former customers of CaseLabs, I have the great pleasure to announce that CaseLabs is officially back after the bankruptcy in 2018! We are now under new management and have re-located to Sweden, but don't worry, everything you knew and loved about CaseLabs will remain the same. We will carry on the spirit of CaseLabs as best as we can while updating existing models and bringing new models to the market.

Let me introduce myself very briefly: My name is Emil, I'm almost 37 years old, I live in Sweden, and I am the new owner of CaseLabs since October 2021. Ever since I first heard that CaseLabs went bankrupt I've been trying to buy CaseLabs' intellectual property. After a long and drawn-out process the trustee and I finally came to an agreement in the spring of 2021 and the purchase was finalized in October 2021. Since then Daniel and I have been working on bringing CaseLabs back to life again.

For those of you familiar with CaseLabs, the demise of the company in 2018 was most likely a sad time when it comes to the history of PC component manufacturers. However, it appears that the company is back in business, under new management and in a new location. CaseLabs was originally from California in the US, but the new owners have moved the company to Sweden. In fact, the key person is said to be a CaseLabs enthusiast by the name of Emil Rytterstedt who bought the rights to the CaseLabs brand in 2021, as well as what appears to be the rights for all of the products that the original company made. For now, the CaseLabs website is back up and running, but the company isn't selling any products, yet.

Based on the information available on the CaseLabs website, the company will initially offer spare parts for existing CaseLabs products, as well as offer support and customer service through it. This will be followed by at least some of the cases that CaseLabs used to offer, which will see some updates, especially when it comes to the I/O options and some other additions such as vertical GPU brackets. However, the longer term plan is to offer new products under the CaseLabs brand, which will apparently start with a smaller form factor case. All the new products will apparently be made in Sweden, so expect CaseLabs products to remain in the premium price segment. For those in the US, the company has already mentioned that the prices will be more expensive than in the past, due to shipping costs. Expect things to kick off sometime in early 2023 when it comes to actual product availability.

CaseLabs, one of the OG brands in the PC gaming community, went bankrupt in 2018 amid the supposed Trump tariffs, which pushed aluminium prices over 80% higher. With the company using aluminium as its exclusive material for cases, the high pricing structure of the source material forced the company to close. However, recently we have heard some rumors of CaseLabs making a comeback with the new ownership. Today, it seems like the new owner posted an online survey to get a better insight into the brand's legacy and just how valuable it is was to consumers.

Many will recall that CaseLabs made very modular cases designed for extreme water cooling. Many developed powerful rigs inside CaseLabs cases, with many still in use, thanks to the quality of the product. The new owner is Emil Rytterstedt, according to sources close to Gamers Nexus. And today, we assume that it is precisely this person that posted an online survey to get a better grasp of the community. You can check out the survey here and enter your thoughts on the brand.

This is still a developing story, however it has matured enough to where we feel confident about discussing it. It kicked off last week when the proprietor of Mayhem Solutions Ltd, better known simply as Mayhems, shared information regarding Thermaltake introducing their own Pastel-branded coolants to be used in the PC DIY water cooling sector. Mayhems has had a trademark registered for this in the UK since 2015, and let Thermaltake know via email to try to reach an amenable solution. Indeed, EKWB and Alphacool had both used the Pastel trademark with Mayhems' permission in the past, some of which also came via using the Mayhems Pastel base under their respective brand names. After word from Thermaltake's legal team, first trying to defend the use of Pastel as a generic term, and then saying that they would work on a compromise, Mayhems told us they have not heard back from the company in over a week since the last correspondence, and are forced to take legal action to prevent Thermaltake P1000 pastel coolants to be sold in the UK.

We wanted to have due diligence in our reporting, and contacted Thermaltake ourselves for a statement. After receiving word that they will send us one, we too have not heard back from the company since. We respect Thermaltake's decision, and are always willing to update this post if they do send us one, but in the meantime we went further. Indeed, a careful look at the trademark (screenshots seen below) confirms Mayhem's legal stance on this matter. However, it is not easy to enforce a trademark in the court. It would be all the more harder to do so when there can be an argument made about the use of the term pastel, which no doubt Thermaltake would argue is not necessarily tied to the coolant, but more as the general term to showcase the various colors and the opaque-nature of said coolants. More on this story past the break, including quotes from retailers we spoke to.

Premium aluminium case maker CaseLabs made a splash in 2015 when it accused Thermaltake of stealing many of its case designs to make "cheap Asian knock-offs." When faced with the prospect of a legal challenge by the much larger Thermaltake, CaseLabs this July withdrew its comments and publicly apologized to Thermaltake for it. Things didn't look up for the company after that. A deadly cocktail of the US-China trade-war, and the default of a large commercial loan account hit the company "at the worst possible time," it said in a statement. Failure to secure additional capital to stay afloat was the last straw.

Apparently, the import tariffs on a wide range of products manufactured in China raised prices for CaseLabs by "almost 80 percent," which cut deeply into the company's margins. The company has since stopped accepting orders, thanked its over 20,000 customers, and promised to fulfill as many of the pending orders as possible, while cautioning that it won't be able to fulfill all of them.The full CaseLabs statement follows.

Premium custom PC case maker CaseLabs announced today a new revision to the Magnum SMA8 case which is easily the company's most popular and best-selling case. The original Magnum SMA8 was released two years ago, and it has become the preferred case for many water-cooling aficionados. The Magnum SMA8 A Revision (SMA8-A) has been refined to make the build process even more enjoyable, and more personalized than ever before! The new revision will be available for pre-order soon.

Thermaltake, a brand that has been associated with DIY PC for decades, is accused of blatantly copying designs of other [smaller albeit popular] brands' products, with some of the new products it unveiled at Computex 2015. It begins with the Suppressor F51, a case that was launched just a month before Computex, and was widely reviewed by the media. Our readers almost instantly noticed (and we agree) that the Suppressor F51 bears an uncanny resemblance to the Define R5, a pioneering case by Fractal Design. We could excuse similarities to an extant, but it appears that Thermaltake copied even intricate design details.

Legit Reviews compiled a list of other products Thermaltake copied in a similar way. These include its Riing series fans, which resemble Corsair Air Series 120 mm; the Commander FT fan-controller copies some UI design elements from the NZXT Sentry 3; and the most blatant rip-off being the W2 CPU water block, which looks identical to the Swiftech Apogee XL. Perhaps the biggest victim of this episode is CaseLabs. A very small player in the PC case industry, CaseLabs is critically acclaimed, and loved by PC enthusiasts to come up with some of the most original high-end case designs. The company's Merlin SM8 and TH10 cases are copied by Thermaltake into two of its prototype cases exhibited at Computex. These examples alone are class-action bait that, if pursued, could lead to a trade-ban for Thermaltake in markets such as the US and EU.

Premium custom PC case maker CaseLabs announced that the limited-edition Mercury S8S is now a permanent addition to the company's lineup, with plans for a new production run. The case will start at US $389.99, with a boat-load of customization options. A successor and variant of the Mercury S8, the S8S is a cubical E-ATX / SSI-EEB case with a motherboard tray along the plane of the base, which acts as a partition for its three chambers.

Designed for liquid-cooling builds, the case features multiple locations where you can place 360 x 120 or 240 x 120 mm radiators, and a full-fledged liquid cooling loop for builds with 3-4 graphics cards and up to two CPU sockets. The case offers a great deal of flexibility, letting you convert space for liquid-cooling hardware into additional drive bays, to accommodate up to 18 3.5-inch hard drives, or up to 36 2.5-inch SSDs. Measuring 369 mm x 483 mm x 380 mm, the case dry-weighs 7.25 kg, and is made almost entirely of aluminium.