Rosewill Blackhawk-Ultra Super Tower Computer Case Review

The first thing you notice when you crack open this case is fans, and tons of them. Rosewill obviously was shooting for extreme airflow and with 5x 140mm fans and 3x 230mm fans the Blackhawk Ultra is sure to provide hurricane winds.

Pulling the left side off to reveal the main compartment the first thing that jumped out at us was the ten HDD mounts and the push pull 140mm fans mounted to the cage. Another item that stuck out was the large rubber grommet next to the standard CPU hole. This is to access the back of the second processor if you happen to be running the SR-2 motherboard. There are also 11 other grommet holes for great cable management all around the motherboard tray. At the bottom of the case, Rosewill provided a nice velcro strap to hold down a bottom mounted PSU below the 10 PCI slots. Note that while it is not really called out in the specifications, you can mount a PSU at the top of the case if you remove the fan(s).

Rotating the case 180 degrees lets us see behind the motherboard where the cables from the fans and top I/O ports hang down.

The four 5.25″ bays are all tool free designs with a very easy to operate slider.

Inside the bottom of the four 5.25″ bays is a removable 3.5″ adapter with a bottom SSD screw hole pattern in case you want to mount a 3.5″ accessory, HDD, or SSD. With 10 3.5″ bays it would be surprising you would need an 11th one so the good news that it is removable.

If you have a massive media collection on a large RAID array, this case can handle it with the 10 universal 3.5″ HDD bays.

The first thing to note about these drive trays is that they are painted steel an not the flimsy plastic we have become familar with most cases today. The other interesting part is that they are all bottom mount with either the rubber grommets or SSD pattern so the drives actually rest on the tray.

The top of the case has two 230mm fans for exhaust in addition to the standard rear 140mm fan.

With all the fans Rosewill realized most people would not want a tangle of power lines running everywhere so they installed fan power hubs at the top and bottom of the case just behind the HDD cage. If you note the little square with two screw ports above and below to the right of the fan power hubs, Rosewill included those as a second option to mount the fan power hubs depending on motherboard size and cable managment. There is also a 3-Pin fan cable that runs between the hubs so you only have to run a molex power to one of them and they are both connected. We would probably see about moving these power hubs to the back of the motherboard tray to clean up wiring, but they are a great addition.

Rosewill includes several nice items with the Blackhawk Ultra in addition to the standard screws and users manual they add two ATX 8-pin power extenders and a set of casters. For a case this large the casters sure make it nice to move around for cleaning or tweaking.