Like their owners, DIY PCs are a diverse lot. Over the years, we’ve seen everything from tiny, plain SFF builds to gigantic, ornate towers. We’ve seen smart, efficient budget builds and mind-blowing, break-the-bank super-builds, and everything in between. If you’re thinking small and unobtrusive for your next build, Rosewill’s Spirit B2 is probably not for you, but if you’d like a case that resembles an enormous stealth aircraft and that can easily swallow up as much high-end hardware as you can throw at it, this is it.
Measuring nearly 23 inches high by nearly 10 inches wide by just over 24 inches deep, calling the B2 Spirit a full-tower case doesn’t really do it justice. On its own it weighs nearly 41 pounds and provides 10 expansion slots, four external toolless 5.25-inch drive bays, and 13—count‘em!—internal drive bays with easy-swap steel trays that accommodate either 3.5-inch or 2.5-inch storage devices. It supports every motherboard form factor from Micro ATX all the way up to HPTX (dual Xeons, anyone?), and handily accepts graphics cards up to 15.75 inches long.
The B2 Spirit comes with five 140mm fans pre-installed (two in front, two up top, and one in the back) and can hold as many as seven if you add one more up top and one on the bottom. There are two locations that support the installation of 280mm radiators (top and front, behind the big stack of drive bays), and the smaller, three-drive cage can be removed to facilitate the forward mount. The massive motherboard tray has two cut-outs for installing CPU coolers and an impressive 15 rubber-grommeted cable management slots, most of which have their own tie-down anchors. And if cable management is your thing, you’ll love the fact that the B2 Spirit gives you more than a full inch of space between the back of the motherboard tray and the right-side panel.
But this case isn’t just big. It’s also wellappointed, with front-panel fans mounted on pop-out panels that are hinged on the right side, so that you can remove or replace them without the need to try and work around the massive drive cage inside. The left-side panel window is spacious and allows a great view of the most important parts in your rig, and the top and front panels are swathed in the matte black, rubbery soft-touch finish that looks and feels much more opulent than the molded plastic you’ll find on a great many other cases.
Speaking of looks, as with Rosewill’s Nighthawk 117, it’s easy to see that the case’s namesake definitely had an impact on its external design and aesthetics. Like the for-real B2 bomber, Rosewill’s case is enormous and matte black with smooth, subtle lines and very few sharp angles. The front of the top panel sports a recessed bank of USB and I/O ports that hide behind a slide-back lid covered in the same soft-touch material as the rest of the panel. In fact, the soft-touch stuff even covers the case’s power and reset buttons. Stealthy! Move toward the back a few inches and you’ll find a pretty cool device for allowing better ventilation up top—there’s a slider switch on the left side of the case above the removable panel; slide it forward, and an approximately 15-inch section of the top panel rises on four struts to create about a half-inch of clearance all the way around.
The B2 Spirit is the biggest Rosewill case we’ve seen to date, and it’s clearly also the best. Rosewill knocks this one out of the park, and what’s even better is that you’ll find it on Newegg for $169.99 (MSRP $199.99), which is less than you’ll pay for quite a few cases that aren’t nearly this nice.
Specs
Dimensions: 22.83 x 9.84 x 24.02 inches (HxWxD); Materials: steel, plastic; Motherboard support: mATX, ATX, E-ATX, XL-ATX, HPTX; Drive bays: 4 x 5.25-inch external, 13 x 3.5-/2.5-inch internal; Fans (included): 2 x 140mm front, 2 x 140mm top, 1 x 140mm rear; Fans (optional): 2 x 200mm/1 x 140mm/3 x 120mm top, 1 x 120mm rear, 1 x 140mm/2 x 120mm bottom; Ports: 4 x USB 3.0, 2 x USB 2.0, audio I/O