Rosewill Blackhawk Ultra Case Unboxing & Overview
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
3,459 words · ~17 min read
0:00
this video is brought to you by our trusted Graphics partner
0:09
NVIDIA welcome to my unboxing and first
0:12
look at the Blackhawk Ultra from Rose
0:15
will the case that is actually almost
0:18
the size of a grown man at least a
0:22
smallish grown man like the one you see before you so we're going to go ahead
0:26
and slice this bad boy open Rose will includes almost no information about the
0:32
Blackhawk itself on the outside of the box so you can see that it's just a
0:37
plain black box this is their Flagship
0:40
case and fits pretty much anything according to their uh well according to
0:47
everything that I already know about this case which is some wow it's heavy
0:52
okay so Rosewell claims the gross weight is around 18.6 kg with the net weight
0:58
being 16. 6 kg so folks that at a
1:03
conversion of about 2.2 kg per pound is
1:07
about 35 lb empty and you can see that
1:11
I'm actually going to run into oh I almost ran into a clearance issue with
1:14
the ceiling just for moving the box from the case so you initially see a big box
1:21
for a case and you go yeah but the case inside Couldn't actually be that big for
1:25
the Blackhawk Ultra it it just is it
1:29
just actually is they're using an extremely high quality foam which I love
1:33
to see check this out more than an inch
1:37
of soft durable closed cell foam around
1:42
every side which is great their feet sit
1:45
in little things here so they're not going anywhere this is expensive foam
1:50
guys I cannot uh I cannot overstate that
1:53
it costs rosew money to put foam like
1:56
that around their case and protect it in the event of shipping however I
2:00
understand why they're doing it because with a heavy large chassis like this
2:05
especially once you start to load components inside it here's the uh the
2:09
other one especially once you start to load components inside it um the risk of
2:15
something being damaged in shipping increases a lot compared to smaller
2:22
cases all right so here we go the
2:25
Blackhawk Ultra which includes all of the cooling
2:31
options so we'll start with uh you know what I'm going to remove all this
2:35
plastic and then we'll be back in a
2:39
moment okay well that actually didn't take as long as I thought it was one
2:43
solid piece of plastic which as someone who opens up a lot of products I
2:47
actually appreciate because it's frustrating when there's like a billion
2:51
different tiny little strips of plastic that you can like peel off with your
2:54
nail and you try not to actually scratch the finish on the product itself so the
2:59
front of the case pretty bare I like that I like a clean
3:03
look they've also gone with a mesh that has kind of a finer mesh behind it so
3:07
you're not going to be too worried about a ton of dust getting pulled into the
3:11
case by the front air intakes they've got four 5 and a/4 inch Baye one of
3:16
which has a 3 and 1 half
3:20
in we'll be back in a moment oh there it is never mind we'll say uh one of which
3:25
has a 3 and 1/2 in adapter in it so you could put in like a card reader or
3:29
something else like that so this is actually intended to be mounted from the
3:33
back so we're just going to go easy on it this time so that you can get a better pressure mount anyway uh so
3:37
that's for a 3 and 1 half in device in the front the sides of the front here
3:42
are sort of a glossy plastic that I wish
3:45
was matte uh looking at the case you know if it was for my own personal use
3:50
however it's at least not a super fingerprint attracting black so you can
3:55
see even though I'm touching it here many cases will be a greasy disgusting
4:00
mess immediately and especially things like routers have you ever actually like
4:04
tried to wipe a fingerprint off a router you go you take your shirt you wipe it
4:07
off and you're like oh now it's covered in micr scratches fantastic this doesn't
4:11
do that so at least it's a it's a good glossy plastic for for what that's worth
4:16
on this side we find a 120 or 140 mm fan
4:20
mount on the back of a motherboard tray this is great for motherboards that do
4:23
have like heat sinks and cooling components or even power phases on the
4:27
back of the board itself so that's really cool to included and on the top
4:31
of the case which I have no idea how I'm going to show to you guys here we go
4:35
maybe we'll just lean her forward ah there's our IO so a whopping 4 USB 2 2
4:42
USB 3 headphone microphone reset power
4:46
this is kind of cool because so many times you see motherboards with like a
4:49
ton of USB 2 headers and you're like okay that's fine what are you going to plug those into exactly well you're
4:54
going to plug them into this case so there you have it as well as check that
4:59
out that dock right there could be used for either 3 and 1/2 in or a 2 and 1/2
5:03
in drive and it's uh it's a little hot swappable dock so you just cheuck your
5:06
drive in there and you can use it for sort of mass storage without actually
5:10
having a portable enclosure so it allows you to use the native SATA interface for
5:15
maximum possible transfer speeds on this side you find that this case is all
5:21
about the cooling so there's a 230 mm
5:25
fan there but check this out you can put up to
5:31
nine 120 mm fans on the outside of this
5:36
side panel which is sort of ridiculous
5:40
wall of fans I guess you have to have somewhere to put those weird uh 9 by10
5:45
mm radi you know I don't know if you could Mount I bet you could probably ghetto mount it that'd be kind of cool I
5:49
don't know if you'd get a fan on every slot just because of internal clearance
5:52
but uh whatever still be cool look how
5:55
big this thing is like it makes me look like a some kind of like homunculus all
6:00
right power supply mount in the top water cooling grommets all over the
6:05
entire back I've actually never seen one actually Implement an external water
6:10
cooling system though so I think these have a dubious value um 120 mm or 140 mm
6:17
fan in the back it comes with a 140 10 PCI Express slots so you can fit any
6:22
kind of XL ATX form factor even the longest nine slot ones with a dual slot
6:26
card in the bottom you've got another Power Supply Mount this one has a foam
6:32
piece right here which we'll check out once we open it up whereas the top one
6:35
looks like it oh yeah it does too so that'll help um dampen noise a little
6:40
bit there on the top of the case you find
6:44
more grills more mesh it's all about
6:48
cooling up here as well so we're going to open it up and find out exactly what
6:51
kinds of fans are in there but it's a more open mesh and then a much finer
6:55
mesh so if you did decide to use those as an intake which isn't necessarily the
6:58
way I'd recommend using them then you could uh uh you could not worry about
7:02
bringing too much dust into the case that way that looks like an 80 mil fan
7:06
Mount there just because uh on that other power supply plate but uh yeah
7:11
let's go ahead and check out the bottom of the case Oh my legs on the bottom we
7:16
find uh I believe there's a fan filter
7:20
on the bottom somewhere but at any rate there's more mesh and uh this really
7:25
feels like it can be removed yeah I think it can so there's
7:30
there's yeah there we go maybe you're
7:33
supposed to remove it I don't even know let's remove it
7:38
anyway Voyage of Discovery time that's my favorite thing about this
7:43
channel Voyages of Discovery where we're
7:46
just not really sure if we're supposed to do things but we do it anyway yeah
7:51
there you go that's a filter it's probably supposed to REM I have no idea how I'm going to get that back in but
7:55
whatever uh rubber feet on the bottom keep it from going anywhere when you
7:58
don't want it to mind you with how much this thing weighs I don't think it's
8:02
going anywhere if you don't want it to and let's go ahead and open her up so
8:07
the side panel mounts with the uh the classic little latches and you've got
8:13
rubber grommets here that are going to prevent unnecessary vibration on the
8:17
mesh side panel from the fans that are mounted here it should be noted that the
8:21
side panel does have a fair bit of flex you can see that it's hard to avoid that
8:25
when you have such a large mesh window so that doesn't give as much support as
8:30
solid metal and when the panel's so large in general but um I mean one
8:36
strategy that you can use if you do have any vibration of the side panel that
8:40
I've used in the past is's a little bit of blue tack um up here here down here
8:45
down here down here and that'll keep it from vibrating against the case so if
8:48
you do run into trouble then you can do that I'm not I'm not saying that you will but um 2 140 mm fans here on the
8:54
other side of the hard drive cages that looks like two 140 m fans at the front
9:00
of the hard drive cages this is a cool configuration because you see a lot of
9:03
cases that have fans right at the front and at the back of the of the hard drive
9:08
mounts and the reason for that is because these are extremely airflow
9:11
restrictive there's actually not a lot of space I don't know if if you can see
9:15
that but between the heart you have to reinforce these because they're going to be full of what is one of the most
9:19
heaviest component the most heaviest one of the heaviest components of your
9:23
system so if you actually filled this thing up with really 10 two yeah with 10
9:29
3 and 1/2 in hard drives you would have a serious situation if this wasn't
9:34
strong enough and it flexed and your hard drives all fell out so you can't
9:38
leave huge gaps so what they've done is they've used a push pull configuration
9:41
to actually manage to move some air through this keeping your drives cool as
9:45
well as providing more uh cool air to the rest of your system these are using
9:49
a very thick steel construction so you can see there's almost no flex to them
9:54
whatsoever and then they're using a rubber grommeted Mount as well so that
9:57
should reduce vibration as well as noise
10:01
from your drives assuming you're using mechanical drives with ssds it obviously
10:05
won't make any difference inside here things are just kind of ridiculous I
10:10
love this so this is this is appropriate they include not one but two eight pin p
10:16
8 Pin CPU power extensions so you could probably put them together but I think
10:21
what they really intend is if you're using a super high-end motherboard like something like an EVGA sr2 or SRX or
10:27
something like that you can actually extend both of your eight pin connectors
10:31
to make sure that they both reach so that's cool comes with
10:34
wheels which is again appropriate especially with the kind of systems that
10:38
some people will be putting in a case like this little locking wheels are very
10:42
appropriate it'll otherwise be quite difficult to move around there are some
10:46
uh looks like about five black cable ties in there that you can use for cable
10:50
managing your system and it comes with one of the largest bags of screws I
10:54
think I've ever seen any case come with ever and I think a big part of the is
10:59
check out all these huge fan screws see
11:02
that these are the biggest fan screws I think I've ever seen love it so there's
11:09
100 bajillion of those to correspond to the 100 bajillion fans that you can
11:14
mount in this chassis all right more features inside so we've got a large CPU
11:19
cutout honestly not that large given the size of the of this motherboard tray but
11:25
think about it this way guys an ATX board is actually going to go from
11:30
here down to here that's how big an
11:34
actual you know what I'm going to go get one we'll be back in a second so here's
11:38
what an a normal ATX motherboard I brought an Intel board because these are
11:41
going to be a a sort of dinosaur soon uh
11:45
that's what a normal ATX board's going to look like in this case so it'll support pretty much any motherboard out
11:50
there look at that you can get form factors all the way over to here I believe it supports
11:54
hptx um but here's what this just for LS
11:57
this is what ITX which is the sort of sort of the smallest mainstream board
12:00
form factor will look like in here so the CPU cutout alone will actually be
12:06
wider than an ITX board so that's one PCI Express expansion slot so xlx it
12:12
usually refers to boards that are longer than normal so they'll still be about this width but can go down to about here
12:17
and then eatx will be about here and are
12:20
maybe a touch longer than that I think somewhere over here and then you can go
12:24
all the way way over here if you want so
12:29
Cable Management this is kind of neat rather than having these bang around
12:32
inside the case they're secured with a little velcro strap here uh you've got
12:36
usb3 for the front USB 2 for the front
12:40
more usb2 for the front front panel audio Molex to power that um that SATA
12:46
Bay up there as well as a SATA cable that you can plug into your motherboard
12:49
and finally your front panel connectors for power reset and all of that other
12:53
good stuff the case doesn't have a built-in fan controller but what it does
12:56
have that I think is kind of cool are a couple of little Fan Hub station things
13:01
so you can plug five fans into each of them and this is just a convenient power
13:07
um redistribution sort of method I I
13:10
wish I'd I wish it was a little bit um I
13:13
wish it was a little bit more cleverly implemented though because some kind of
13:17
uh speed control built into the power Distribution Hub would be great and the
13:21
other thing is particularly this one looks like it's going to be an issue to plug a Molex connector in here without
13:26
having clearance issues with this fan so there'll there be a little bit of kaj
13:30
jiggering that'll go on in order to actually finish a build in this case
13:33
Cable Management holes I wish as as well were a little bit um a little bit clever
13:38
because they've got quite a small hole here so you can take some of your cables up through here so it's going to be your
13:42
24 pin your eight pin your a couple of
13:45
six pins for your graphics cards and then that's pretty much going to be full
13:50
by the time you also bring up you know there's your motherboard connectors and
13:53
stuff like that so I wouldn't have minded seeing this whole Space down here
13:56
open to bring cables up cuz it's it's one toone relationship at some point
14:01
right so if you've got all of these holes that means that it all had to come
14:05
out again somewhere else and there isn't really enough space for that so there's
14:09
same same thing here so if a normal motherboard is going to be about this width you're going to have to run your
14:14
SATA cables away from the board all the way out to here in order to hide them
14:17
and bring them back around to the uh to the hard drive cages there's your
14:21
tool-free mounting mechanism for your 5 and 1/4 in Bay you don't have to use it
14:25
though there's mounting holes behind it and two 230 mm fans Adorn the top of the
14:31
case neither of which are plugged into these power distribution hubs so again
14:34
there's going to be a little bit of configuration that goes on before you
14:37
can finish with uh your your system
14:41
setup um motherboard tray I would have liked to see it a little bit more stiff
14:45
but by the time you actually load components on it I think some people
14:48
make too much um make too much of the
14:52
strength of a motherboard tray being a huge deal because especially once you
14:56
throw a board on it it actually does stiffen up a Fair bit so we're going to
15:00
go ahead and pull the other side panel off
15:03
here all right see how much room we got for cable management because if the
15:07
intention is to mount a massive system with all the fixings then they better
15:11
have enough room for massive cables with all the fixing so you got probably about
15:15
an inch of space back here um it it cuts
15:18
off a little bit near the bottom but that's fine you shouldn't be running any cables there anyway and there should be
15:22
plenty of space to run things like here here's an example SATA cable you could
15:26
run like an actual bundle of SATA cables probably about four thick by the time
15:30
you run out of space between this and the edge of the side panel here um lots
15:36
of here we go H maybe not as many as i'
15:39
actually okay yeah no there's a fair number of them so lots of mounting points so these little anchors these
15:43
Loops right here where you can route cables more permanently um there's
15:48
there's enough of them I'd say to bring everything over here keep it nice and
15:51
tidy bring your 24 pin up see you can see they thought of that as well as to
15:55
secure your eight pin in the correct place so this will run across the back of the board here that uh 140 mm fan was
16:01
going to go right on the back of the motherboard tray there and other than that the other side of the case is
16:06
fairly nondescript so I think that pretty much wraps it up thank you for
16:09
checking out this unboxing and first look at the Blackhawk Ultra from Rose
16:14
don't forget to subscribe forus Tech tips for more unboxings reviews and
16:17
other computer videos and I mean here's a fun challenge for you
16:21
guys how many ITX systems Could you
16:25
actually fit in here one
16:32
two
16:35
three there's a little actually hold on there's one more thing there's a little
16:39
note here if your power supply is equipped with a single fan you have two
16:42
ways to install it oh really you mean
16:46
just like every other case okay don't forget to subscribe
16:51
planus Tech tips again subscribe twice