Performance -
Like most things that I review I tend to look at more than one aspect of performance. For me a case has to offer several things before it makes the cut. One of the first things it has to do is be easy to work with. It can be the best looking case on the planet, but if you cannot get your parts installed properly well then it is useless. The next thing it has to do is keep your parts cool this is the air flow test. Lastly (in my book anyway) it has to look good.
Ease of Build -
The board that I chose for this was a little bit larger than you would normally try to fit into a mid-tower case. However, that is why I chose it; I felt that the Asus Rampage III Extreme would be perfect for this. Surprisingly, I was able to drop this board in without too much trouble. I did have to sacrifice cable management a bit as these now needed to run in front of the board instead of alongside it as you would with a more normal sized board. Installing my two drives were fairly easy except that is was a pain to line up the holes on the side with the mounts that ThermalTake provides. The mounts for the optical drives were much easier to use though. The next issue we found was with the peripheral mounts. These were clunky and rickety. Although they came out easy enough they often did not go back in to easily especially with the dual height GPU that I dropped in. All in all I was not too disappointed by the V9 BlackX. It could be a little better; especially the HDD mounts and the peripheral hold downs. But for the most part things are not too bad.
Air Flow -
I was rather impressed with the cooling on the ThermalTake V9 BlackX. I really expected it to be less than adequate to be perfectly honest with you. I felt that the cooling vents on the sides were gimmicky and not very effective. However with the way the intake and exhaust fans are placed they actually work.
Even with the Rampage III Extreme, a Core i7 975 and 12GB of Kingston DDR3 1600 memory and an ATi FireGL Pro 8800 graphics card in the box the temps were fairly low and the noise was more than acceptable. In fact it was downright quite compared to many cases out there.
Aesthetics -
I am not completely sure about the looks of the V9 BlackX. It is ok looking although it does remind me of the Case 900. I asked my usual assortment of people about its looks and most of them said they thought is looked pretty good. From the front or the three-quarter view it has a certain flow to it; looking at it on the side though it looks very odd. The diagonal window does give it an interesting flare, while the dual docking stations are placed in such a way that they are not an eyesore when they are not in use. Still there is something about it that I like (which is what almost everyone I asked said).
Dock Performance -
The dual HDD docks on the top of the V9 BlackX connect directly to the SATAII ports on the motherboard so the performance is the same as a directly connected drive. We ran multiple drives in these bays including SSDs and found no difference in performance between being directly connected to the motherboard and the drives in the dock. I would have to wonder who would use these on a regular basis though. It is too bad these do not support SATA 3.0 with or we could test out some next generation SSDs for you
