Xilence XQ Series Interceptor Full Tower Chassis Review

I have mixed feelings about the Xilence Interceptor, I don’t much care for its style choices and overall design, with its heavy use of plastic and I think the red detailing on the top looks a little cheap. Internally its not the best looking layout either and the side panel on the right doesn’t exactly help it either. Yet even though the style doesn’t appeal to me visually, I do like it for another reason.

This chassis wasn’t designed for looks, at least I don’t think it was. It was however designed for a purpose and Xilence have gone well out of their way to deliver practical solutions to the demands of those looking to build an extreme performance system. While the side panel doesn’t look fantastic, it does offer a great level of airflow to the internal components, especially if you install some extra fans there. The viewing window isn’t big enough to provide a style feature, but it is however big enough to inspect your system, demonstrated by the fact I could see the temperature reactive lights on our CPU cooling block.

The internal cabling didn’t look fantastic, but this is due to the rack of hot swap drives that make it possible to wire up every hard drive bay. Doing so means you never need to access the chassis interior to manage your storage devices as this can all be taken care of from the front panel. There is a colossal amount of room for expansion cards, water cooling and even a dual socket motherboard, just about every extreme and high end performance component should fit in here in one configuration or another.

While you could fit this with an impressively powerful gaming system and I’m sure many people will do just that, I think this chassis boils down to something a little more practical. The full rack of hot swap drive bays makes this ideal for server based and network storage applications, or any work environment that requires you to move your hard drives between different system. The dual socket motherboard support and ten expansion slots make this idea for a high powered rendering rig or similar high computation system also.

It seemed pretty much a waste to install our Intel 2500k, GTX 560 Ti and water cooling block in this system, even though it offers rock solid performance it barely scratches the surface of what this chassis could handle. It’s because of the uncompromising approach to performance, not style, that I am happy to award the Xilence Interceptor with our Editors Choice Award, who cares about style when you can have four graphics cards and two CPU’s?