Aerocool Strike-X Xtreme Black Edition Review

The Aerocool Strike-X Xtreme has a lot of things going for it that I really like, but it also has a few things that I’m not so keen on, this was of course to be expected and within this price range you rarely find perfection and budget models have to make a few sacrifices somewhere.

The side panel does look great with that “X” design, as too does the top panel but where the top panel is practical in that it allows airflow to the top mounted cooling, there are no fan mounts on the side panel and I think it would have been better with fan mounts / ventilation on the left side or no ventilation at all. The current setup may allow lots of dust in and lots of noise out, which doesn’t justify a design features at all.

The cable routing isn’t the best design ever but it’s nice that it has been catered to at all and as you saw in our build section it still looked great when it was all put together. There is plenty of room for storage too, although I’m not so sure a chassis this size needs so many 5.25″ drive bays, can’t fault it for having them of course, id rather have more room for HDD’s and front panel cooling.

Speaking of cooling, I love that Aerocool have included three decent quality fans, with a good air intake fan in the front and two exhaust fans that should be more than enough for any low-mid power systems airflow requirements. Of course should you need to boost airflow there are plenty of spaces to mount your own fans on the front panel, top panel and back panel.

The chassis comes fully equipped to handle some moderate water cooling, has support for USB 3.0 with backwards compatibility for USB 2.0 for those with older motherboard designs, slide out HDD trays that make for easy drive swaps, some cable management and a dust filter on the underside for inverse PSU mounting, overall a feature complete feature set for a budget model and while there are a few shortfalls, it’s nothing I wouldn’t expect from a more budget friendly model, but you do still get a fair bit in return from this product.

Pros

• Three pre-installed cooling fans
• USB 3.0 support
• Water cooling compatible
• Air filter on PSU
• Cable management included

Cons

• Cable management could be a little better
• Snap-off expansion slot covers
• Could get noisy
• Dust may become an issue on chassis interior

eTeknix says: “It falls short of our award today, but that doesn’t mean it is a bad product. It looks fantastic in my opinion and the fact that there are three fans included in the price makes this incredible value for money too, if your on a tighter budget and you need a chassis that can handle multiple graphics cards, plenty of storage and you want some cable management and other modern comforts, then the Strike-X Xtreme is worth putting on your list.”