Specifications, Availability and Pricing

XClio's Blackhawk comes with an all black exterior built from mainly S.E.C.C, 0.8mm steel panels, but utilizing plastic on the front bezel. This full tower chassis has support for boards from mATX to full ATX, which XClio gives dimensions of 12" by 13" as the space allotted for the motherboards. With the use of removable HDD rack assemblies, the Blackhawk can have up to six 5.25" bays to use if you remove one of the assemblies and three bays if you leave both of them in. If both assemblies are left in the chassis, it leaves three 5.25" bays, but room for up to eight 3.5" hard drives.

XClio took cooling just as serious in this chassis as I have seen in both of the other submissions thus far. On the Blackhawk, the front I/O is where all the magic happens. There are controls for the RPM of the fans, the LED's being on or off, as well as switches to turn sections of fans on or off separately. Inside the chassis there are a total of five fans that are controlled here. Four of these are 120mm with blue LED's while the fifth is a 250mm fan in the door, which also has LEDs. Along with the fan controls you will find the e-SATA, four USB 2.0 and audio and microphone connections.

Selection of e-tailers is extremely limited on the Blackhawk. Google shopping for the chassis shows me only four hits, and one of them is for the Advanced version of this chassis. Out of the three places that stock the Blackhawk, the best deal is found at Newegg for $119.99, plus a bit of shipping, of course. The fourth hit is for the Blackhawk Advanced, which only lists at Newegg and they are getting $139.99 for that one. Shipping is also a bit more on this version, so keep that in mind if a window isn't a "must" in your purchase.