Rosewill B2 Spirit HPTX Full-Tower Chassis Review

Introduction

Rosewill is one of the most popular chassis manufacturers in the US, offering up an impressive product range that caters to every part of the market. Recently, Rosewill has moved their products across the Atlantic, giving the wider world a taste of their chassis, power supplies and more! With that in mind, we’re very happy to see their flagship product, the B2 Spirit, in the eTeknix office today.

“Rosewill’s flagship case, the B2 SPIRIT delivers an aesthetic touch with a stealthy appearance, although seeing can be deceiving… Underneath its silent strength is a formidable arsenal with serious expansion flexibility. Whether you are building a massive storage monster, a sophisticated cooling system, or a pure performance beast, the Rosewill B2 SPIRIT has got you covered – with style!” – Rosewill

The B2 Spirit, a name derived from the legendary B2 stealth bomber, is not to be taken lightly. Equipped with room for (up to) HPTX motherboard, a colossal amount of storage drives, extensive cooling, it’s an extremely capable chassis for the enthusiast and workstation market.

“Rosewill B2 SPIRIT is compatible with the largest HPTX mainboard. Two sets of HDD cages support up to 13 HDDs and/or SSDs. You can easily install multiple graphics cards (up to 15.75” long) into the chassis. With strong performance comes great cooling exigency. The B2 SPIRIT supports up to seven 140 mm fans. But if that’s not enough, two 280 mm liquid-cooling radiators can be installed on the top and front.” – Rosewill

The only downside of being able to support such a large motherboard and so much more hardware is the size and weight. The B2 spirit is a thundering 39.24 lb (approx 18kg) and has some rather colossal external dimensions too.

The chassis is huge, no doubt about that part, with a massive matte black side panel and a sizable window that’s perfectly placed to show off the PSU, GPU and CPU cooler hardware.

Down the right-hand side, another large matte black panel, and just like the left, it’s held in place by a pair of thumbscrews at the rear of the chassis.

The front panel is coated in a stealthy soft-touch rubber, giving it a hard-wearing matte finish. There are four 5.25″ drive bays at the top, and they should give you some impression of the overall size of the chassis.

Each bay comes with a clip-in cover to held keep the design nice and uniform.

The bottom half of the front panel has a magnetic door, opening it up shows a good thick panel that should block a lot of system noise, as well as two smaller doors for the front panel cooling.

Each “door” opens out allow you to slide out their individual dust filters for quick and easy maintenance.

While the fans mouse to the same door using quick release clips, meaning you can remove the entire fan housing and clean that easily too! This is very handy, I like this feature a lot as I live in a dust area, so have to clean my fans and filters often.

Around the back, you’ll see again just how tall this chassis is. At the top, you’ll find four rubber grommets for cable/water routing, a 140mm exhaust fan, 10 ventilated expansion slots and the PSU cut-out.

The top panel keeps the same matte rubber finish of the front panel, giving it a nice and uniform appearance. But what’s this? The top panel is closed up and theses a little slider on the side?

That’s right, the B2 Spirit has a deployable roof for the top panel cooling. If you need to fire up your top fans for extra cooling performance, pop the roof open and get extra cooling, if you’re wanting silence, stop the fans and close the top back up again! This is another cool feature, not something we haven’t seen before, but still a welcome addition.

The front panel has a nice and large power button with the reset button to the right of it. The main I/O panel is hidden under a slide-away cover to keep it free from dust and debris.

Behind the cover, you’ll find four USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports and HD audio jacks, so you’ll certainly not be left wanting for connectivity here.

The base of the chassis has four large feet with hard-wearing rubber grips on the bottom. There’s also a 3/4 length dust filter to cater to any bottom ventilation, especially so for the power supply.