Cases with a cigarette lighter, oven, and ashtray – recalling the era when a PC pretended to be a car

A computer case stopped being just a box for hardware a long time ago – these days it's a showcase of tempered glass, RGB lighting, and vertically mounted graphics cards.

But there was a period when manufacturers crammed whatever they could find into 5.25-inch bays, logic be damned. A cigarette lighter. A cup holder. An ashtray. A mini oven.

All of that actually existed and got sold to real people.

Nostalgia for this kind of hardware flared up around a photo of an old tower case with a car cigarette lighter and cup holder built in. Putting a lighter inside a case made mostly of plastic sounds like a recipe for a fire, and not without reason.

YouTuber Clint from LGR once demonstrated just how dumb and dangerous the whole idea of a glowing hot coil inside a PC case really was.

That said, technically it's all pretty mundane – just a standard 12V DC connection, the same one that's been in cars for over fifty years, so the panic about heat is somewhat overblown.

Another point worth raising – the cup holder in these PCs couldn't even fit a standard 12oz can. One person in the discussion put it bluntly:

"I had this thing. It was called a cupholder but clearly was meant to be an ashtray."

That checks out, since the opening was too narrow for a normal can but just right for a cigarette.

The absurdity didn't stop there. The era also gave us a 5.25-inch mini oven, a gaming PC concept with a built-in coffee machine, and CoolerMaster actually released a device with an onboard coffee maker.

The irony is that modern graphics cards with their sparking power pins pose a far bigger fire risk these days than that poor old 12-volt cigarette lighter ever did.