Xigmatek Elysium Super-Tower Full Tower Chassis Review

Today we're taking a look at the gargantuan Elysium Super-Tower PC Chassis from Xigmatek, a case big enough for even the most extreme system builds you can image, with support for ample watercooling, 12 x 5.25 drive bays, quad gpu motherboards and a whole lot more on top of that. Xigmatek have been going since 2005 and have been creating computer peripherals ever since, ranging from cases like the one we're looking at today, thermal solutions and manufacturing, with a team of twenty R&D engineers, designers and technicians working to create products like the Elysium. Here is a little quote from the Xigmatek site about this chassis. "ELYSIUM – Domicile of the blessed in the ROMAN EMPIRE, surrounded by own stars and a sun - your new high end gaming tower. Spotlighting your hardware with 12*5.25” drive bays and two 4 in 3 HDD cages. Supporting extreme HPTX, XL-ATX, and downward form factors. Aluminum and mesh front design with USB 3.0 and Hot-Swap HDD docking on the top panel. Two mounting possibilities for PSU’on the top and bottom, and water cooling experts and enthusiasts will be overwhelmed with their radiators up to 420mm including seven spots for the tube guidance." Specification: So with all the technical stuff out of the way, lets start by taking a look at exactly what the Elysium has to offer. Taking a look at the front of the box we get our first look at the case design and its slogan "The one and only" as well as a really cool spaceship design featured in the background, which really makes the box stand out, unfortunately this box is in pretty bad shape at the moment. Around the back of the box we can see the same spaceship design, along with a few product shots of some of the major features, but we'll take a better look at those in a moment. Given this cases size and its high price tag I was expecting to find more in the way of extras, but in the box you will find its manual, a selection of nuts and bolts, a power led adaptor, some cable ties and some very handy caster wheels to help with mobility, this is not the sort of system that you can move easily, so this is a very handy extra to have. On the side of the case we can see a massive u-shaped viewing window, which comes with ventilation slots on the top and bottom as well as the custom 230mm side panel fan, and you can see along the top a quick release panel with the Xigmatek "X" in the middle, which acts as both an air filter for any top mounted fans, extra ventilation and a cover for any screw you use for mounting cooling components. There is very little going on around the back, but as you can see there is a slot for an additional 120mm fan on the rear of the motherboard. The front of the chassis is fairly simple, with a huge number of bays available the entire front section is taken up with removable panels, every one of which is ventilated to provide extra cooling, helped along by 2 x 120mm fans installed in the lower half of the chassis. Along the top of the front panel you will find a host of ports that include e-Sata, USB, Headphone, Microphone & USB 3.0 as well as a HDD docking station and a power button. If you look at the bottom right hand corner of the picture you can also see the power and HDD load LEDS. Around the back of the case you can see there are options for installing the power supply unit in either the bottom or the top of the case, or I guess if needs must you could install two of them. You'll also find 2 cut outs for water cooling in the top right and a further 5 lower down, giving you plenty of room for cooling pipes or routing of extra cables. Further down you can see another pre-installed cooling fan, then below that a staggering 10 ventilated expansion slots. Flipping the case so we can see underneath there are some rubber grip feet, as well as the screw holes for mounting the caster wheels should you need them and a huge ventilation area for installation of extra fans, radiators or just for allowing extra air flow. Inside the case its pretty obvious that there is a lot of room, with the full rack of drive bays on the right, 12 cable management slots as well as several cutaways from motherboard and cooling installation, both the top and bottom PSU bays. With a closer look you can see each of the drive bays is fitted with a quick release / lock mechanism for easy drive installation. In the back of the case you can see one of the preinstalled Xigmatek fans just below the top PSU slot. Further down we have the 10 expansion slots, each ventilated and with quick release thumb screws for easy installation, as well an array of 5 water cooling / cable routing cut-outs down the left hand side. The back panel comes fitted with a huge 230mm fan preinstalled on it, but even in this case it manages to look small, but it provides the extra side cooling you would require in a system that can hold upto 4 GPUS. With a full system in place it becomes a lot clearer how big this chassis actually is, this graphics card has never had to much room to breathe, because this case is so big we hardly had to use any of the available cable management cut-outs. the Antec Kuhler 920 sits nicely at the tom left of the chassis, leaving plenty of room between its self and the motherboard, leaving plenty of room for easy access when installing the other components or making upgrades. The front of the chassis is much the same, having a single optical drive in the top just highlights scale of this chassis yet again, I didn't much like the drive bays on this chassis, but I'll explain more about that in a moment. The drive bays are dived into 4 slots per cage over 3 cages, but unfortunately this system doesn't come with support for an SSD hard drive, something to keep in mind and you would likely require a bracket to hold it firmly in place, as such ours is just sat at the bottom of the chassis. Around the back of the chassis everything looks nice and tidy once installed, with plenty more room for the graphics card and air flow even after a complete system has been installed. Once the side panel is installed some of the cable management issues I was havving didn't really matter, the huge fan on the side panel completely obscures out entire motherboard and all the components, from a flat side angle the only thing you can see is the Antec logo on the PSU, but otherwise the case just looks empty, which given the scale of this case compared to the installed components, it kind of is. Now that the build is complete, how good is the Xigmatek Elysium, well given that Xigmatek have a pretty solid reputation for their pc cases, so I wasn't expecting this thing to be anything but impressive. It has a certain overpowering presence to it that just cannot be ignored, while its size is huge, its that size for good reason, to accommodate the extreme multi gpu systems with advanced water cooling or even just a dozen hard drives for networking, this case can cater to a lot of thing. The build quality is fantastic on the most part, I scratched my hands quite badly more that a couple of times when dealing with the covers on the 5.25" drive bays, since they are made out of perforated aluminium that is folded over, leaving them with razor sharp edges, at this price there is no excuse for these not having a better construction in my opinion. While the cable management solutions are in abundance, they just didn't seem to be in the right place for the combination of components we used for this build, everything felt like it was 1 or 2 inches away from where it should be, likely because this chassis is ideally for a much larger motherboard, given that there is a massive amount of space inside and that things looked tidy enough I won't mark the chassis down for it, plus once the side panel is on you can bared see anything past that 230mm fan anyway, so it still looks great. The build process in general was extremely easy, with so much room to spare there was hardly any fiddling about and I was able to click everything into place and have the system up and running in about 30min, the only set backs I had were the sharp edges on the drive covers, the fact that it weights so much made it difficult to move the rig about while installing components and the last problem I had was that the top 5.25 drive bay won't accept a DVD-Rom. Since there is a 5.25" bay at the top, one would assume that you can slot a drive straight in, but half way in there is a hard wired bundle of cables that prevents you from pushing it beyond halfway into the case, which is why you will notice the drive is in the 2nd slot in our photographs, I'm not sure if that is poor design or not, but the case is already massive, surely making that extra 5mm or space for the DVD drive wouldn't have been too much to ask. Overall though I'm very happy with this case, while its not something your everyday system builder is going to need, you quite literally get a lot for your money, while there were some minor flaws with its design, they don't take away from the fact that this is one impressive piece of hardware, so even though it costs £140 in a choice of black or silver with windows, I am still going to award the Xigmatek Elysium our Bang For Buck Award, simply because of the number of features you get for your money on this chassis.