Rosewill Blackhawk Ultra Case Review: Were It Not For Competition
by Dustin Sklavos on March 28, 2013 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
- Rosewill
- HPTX
- ATX
- XL-ATX
Conclusion: Thermal Performance at Any Cost
The brute force approach to cooling that Rosewill has taken with the Blackhawk Ultra case is almost kind of awe inspiring. They've essentially thrown so many fans at the cooling problem and offered such flexibility in arranging the cooling system that it's hard to really beat them on that front. This case moves a tremendous amount of air, and when you install a very high end system in it, the power of all of those fans becomes apparent.
I also have to credit Rosewill for producing a case that's actually pretty conservative in a lot of the right ways. The things you'd expect to be really obnoxious turn out to be less so: the red LEDs in the fans are actually pretty muted, and for having eight fans with no throttle, the Blackhawk Ultra could've been a lot noisier. If you want to see how cooling can go horribly wrong, go back and look at the Cubitek HPTX ICE's results. They also know how big their case is, and amusingly enough, they include casters you can install in the bottom of the case so you can roll your giant computing beast wherever you need to.
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So if the Blackhawk Ultra is nigh unstoppable on the thermal front, why doesn't it get a glowing recommendation? For starters, it may be quieter than I expected, but that doesn't mean it's actually quiet. That wouldn't be a problem if the case was competing in the same market the Thor v2 does, but it's not. My mantra has been that once you get past $150 you should be expecting both excellent thermals and great acoustics, not one or the other. You're paying the premium so you don't have to choose. The lack of fan filters also means the Blackhawk Ultra is going to be high maintenance.
There are really a couple of flies in the ointment here. First, unless you need the form factors the Blackhawk Ultra supports (or you really want to be able to roll your case around), the case is essentially beaten on two fronts. You can get basically the same case, but cheaper and in some ways better, by buying Rosewill's own Thor v2 for $40-$50 less (ignoring frequent discounts from sales.) At the same price point, the Blackhawk Ultra is hanging out in the same neighborhood as NZXT's Phantom 630, and outside of a couple of degrees of raw thermal performance, the 630 is in most ways a superior case. Even with its fans turned all the way up, it's measurably quieter than Rosewill's case.
Ultimately I can see why the Blackhawk Ultra is selling well and reviewing well. Users who want a beefy rig for a decent price will take one look at the brute force cooling of this case and click "Add to Cart," and when they get it, by and large they probably won't be disappointed. Yet this is precisely why comparative reviews are important; the Rosewill Blackhawk Ultra looks fantastic on paper, but there are demonstrably better cases out there.
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marc1000 - Thursday, March 28, 2013 - link
I guess that's the reason he complains about the cable management issue. It's more of a "chicken and egg" problem lol !!!Jorus - Saturday, August 31, 2013 - link
Did you notice the lack of tie downs? This doesn't excuse the mess in the case but not much to work with under the motherboard for cable management. A shame. I really like the layout. Lack of toolless 3.5, lack of tie downs, small grommets and bad spacing as well, and having to remove front bezel to put in 5.25's. NZXT Phantom 630 or Enermax Fulmo GT is looking like better options for the price range.doubletake - Thursday, March 28, 2013 - link
I feel AnandTech should sponsor Dustin with a personal trainer + intense workout regimen, so he can (hopefully) stop complaining about a case's weight, and the "difficulty" in mounting notched side panels. Apart from that, I enjoy the rest of the content in his reviews.HisDivineOrder - Thursday, March 28, 2013 - link
You could always Kickstarter one.Ninhalem - Thursday, March 28, 2013 - link
I can lift a decent amount of weight (usually lifting 50 to 60 lb gauges all day at work), and I can understand some of Dustin's issues. I don't want to have to lift my case all day long because 1) I'm afraid of dropping the sucker (weighs about 45 lbs) and destroying components, and 2) there are not a lot of decent hand holds on cases especially when you need to lift in a specific configuration (especially when you have a custom loop inside where items aren't always secured down).As for the notched side panels, I usually don't have difficulty with those, but putting both the side panels on after a cleaning is just annoying. I don't like to be annoyed after spending 3 hours cleaning the inside. It is not hard implementing engineering changes to put swing doors on these cases especially if you are charging over $150 USD.
Observist - Thursday, March 28, 2013 - link
Well, Dustin does say that 60 lbs is almost half his body weight, so he's not a big guy. If, like many computer enthusiasts, he were carrying around an extra 200 lbs at all times, lifting a 60 lb case wouldn't be such a big deal, but alas, you're giving him crap for being small.Th-z - Thursday, March 28, 2013 - link
Suggestion: please include filter as a category in your spec table in your case reviews, Dustin. Maybe it's something you don't care so you never/rarely mention even for a case with dust filters in your reviews, but your readers may want to know. Nowadays I don't consider any case without intergrated, easy to remove filters, because even for case with filters, I also have to check the density of filters, and how many fan slots are covered (especially for the intakes). So at least some mentions of it would be appreciated, having some pictures taken would be even greater.Onus - Thursday, March 28, 2013 - link
While a good argument can be made that such shouldn't be necessary at this price point, adding a fan controller oneself and adding fan filters (e.g. nylon hosiery stretched on a frame) will address the noise and dust issues without doing any real harm to cooling performance. The fan controller is incidentally another excellent use for a 5-1/4" bay.freedom4556 - Thursday, March 28, 2013 - link
I don't understand the general disdain for 5.25" bays perpetrated in Anandtech case reviews. I can easily see someone wanting two optical drives for simultaneous rip/burn and a fan controller, and if that's a double height model then that's four bays right there. A case of this ridiculous magnitude should have had four bays as a minimum (which it does). How likely is needing 10 3.5" drives verses two opticals and a fan controller (or two, given how many fans this case supports)? Personally, I think that the suggestion that anyone buying a case this massive would want to whip out and use "an external enclosure and a USB cable" (pg 2) for installing stuff from DVD or watching a blu-ray is asinine, especially when the case comes with a hard drive dock (a more likely use for the "an external enclosure and a USB cable" scenario). Enough with the pie-in-the-sky 'everything's digital distribution and in the cloud' rhetoric already. It's just not true, and not all (even most?) of us have 100 mbps internet connections at our disposal. </soapbox>Grok42 - Friday, March 29, 2013 - link
I am the source of some of this so called general disdain on the case review comments. If you look back through my posts I never complain about them on large cases such as these. My chief complaint is the lack of choice. There are only two mITX cases sans an external drive bay and both of those are recently released. I built my Core i7 3770 / 16GB / Ti 560 gaming rig out of one of them the Lian Li QB25 so I put my $120 where my mouth is. I couldn't be happier with this setup and not once did I need to use an optical drive to install the system or the ~30 games I have on it.The fact is that the vast majority of computers don't have optical drives anymore. If you could phones and tablets as computers then the vast majority don't have any external storage including SD cards. Given that I like to be on the bleeding edge of computing and build custom computers why do I have to put up with cases full of legacy bays I don't need or want? Building custom computers is going to die if the industry clings to the past completely.
As to you other straw man arguments. I long since ripped all my DVDs to my media server. I haven't bought a DVD in years. If you like renting them and buying them more power to you but you also have to admit there is a large portion of the population that doesn't do this anymore and it is only getting larger. 4 years ago all this might have been pie in the sky but today everyone has laptops and tablets without optical drives and are happy watching all their media via digital distribution. These aren't techs but grandmothers. Finally I certainly don't have a 100mbps internet connection. My parents have a 1.5mb and I have a 6mb connection. We commonly stream 3 videos on different TVs without issue and sometimes 4.