Xilence Technology Co., Ltd. was founded in 2003 and is a German-Chinese manufacturer of components for cooling and noise reduction in PCs. The range of products consists of cases, power supply units, case fans, notebook coolers, CPU-, HHD-, GPU-, RAM- and Northbridge-coolers. The main mission is to create affordable, low noise and low power consuming products.

The box consists of a classy black and white design. Highlighting the main features of the Black Hornet Midi Tower case on the back side.

The case design immediately rings a bell. The Black Hornet seems from the same design team, that created the Enermax Hoplite case. Slight alterations to the front panel can be directly spotted at first glance. Instead of multiple doors we have now have one big front door panel.

The black and red theme is a real eyecatcher. Making a dull black case look very professional. Let's take a closer look on the front panel before we continue with the other features. Two USB 3.0 ports, one eSATA port, two audio jacks and the comon power and reset button. The front panel is easily removable and sports the front 140mm fan.

By removing two screws, we can slide out the top cover , this facilitates the access to the top cutout to either install two fans of 120 or 140mm dimensions. There's plenty of space to install a radiator for your favourite watercooling kit. We installed the Corsair Hydro 100 unit for the temperature tests.

On the right picture you can notice the green PCB that serves as the docking station. Just plug in the SATA cable and power connector and you are good to go. The docking station can be used for 2.5" or 3.5" HDD's.

When opening the front door, you spot directly the two Hot Swappable front loading trays for easy SATA HDD removal. The rear side requires a 4 pin molex to be connected and two SATA cables. There's also the possibility two hook up two case fans.

The loading trays are SSD ready. We encountered a small problem with the installation of the 3.5" HDD. If we mounted the HDD with the 4 screws it didn't seem to make proper contact with the PCB's contact points. When pushing the HDD further back and just using two screws we established proper contact. I hope Xilence can rectify this small issue.

For the PSU, there no anti vibration grommets, luckily a removable dust filter is present.

The front 140mm fan is positioned in the front door panel. The red LEDS again provide that extra touch to this case. The front fan is near silent in operation. This also counts for the rear 120mm fan.

Behind the fan is an easily removable red plastic grill, with idem ditto dust filter. Not hindering airflow of the fan...but...

The fan blows directly onto this mesh and behind it are these tiny holes. This was one of the main criticism I had with the Enermax case and it seems the front air flow issue is still present. You can see the HDD cage behind the holes, so I've got no idea why the PR people mention on the box : maximum HDD cooling. Seems pretty unlogic to me as the airflow looks more maximum obstructed.

Talking about the HDD cage, it can house up to four 3.5" HDD's and up to two 2.5" HDDs or SSDs. They securely slide into the red plastic supports, without the need for any screws. But the HDD cage is fragile. If used too much force, it can easily bend. The cage door, to protect the HDD's, looks pointless. It seems just there to avoid the HDD's to accidentily slide out. To enhance cooling ? I doubt it...

A massive opening for easy CPU cooler (backplate) installation. The mobo tray also has loads of rubber covered holes to facilitate cable routing. The backplate covers are ventilated and painted red to enhance the theme even more.

The 5.25" drives are secured via big red screw knobs. The USB3.0 cable can be hooked up straight to the motherboard. If you still own a non supported mobo there's still the option to plug it into a USB2.0 header.

The Black Hornet was completed with the following components :

• Asus Sabretooth X79 mainboard
• Intel 3960X OC'ed at 4.5Ghz 1.37Vcore
• Corsair Hydro100 cooling
• 16Gb G.Skill RipjawsZ 2133C9 rams
• GTX480 Fermi graphic cards
• 1 x Intel 520 240GB SSD
• 2 x Western Digital 1TB Caviar Green Hard Drives
• Corsair TX850 Power Supply.

We opted to use the Sabretooth board for it's Thermal Radar software and readout points.

After some struggling with routing the cables we achieved a pretty clean build. I must say the red and black is the icing on the cake. Maximum GPU length is 330mm which is more than enough for most videocards. Nevertheless, better verify first as this case does not have a removable HDD cage to allow using longer cards.

The Corsair Hydro 100 was a bit tricky to install, but patience is a virtue. This cooler allows for great cooling and to obtain a very clean build. Routing the PSU cables was a breeze with the appropriate cutouts, even the top 8 pin CPU connector has got a nice spacious hole to route it through.

The HDD case is easy to use, just don't use too much force when sliding in the HDD's. The room to tuck away the cables is limited , even tough the sidepanel has it's extrusion. Easiest way to to tuck them away, is behind the cage of the hot swappable drives.

Temperature tests

For the temperature test we went with a single GTX480 Fermi GPU setup. The Idle results are measured after 15 mins of idling. The CPU Load test results are obtained after 30 mins of number crunching prime95, custom test 12 - 12K, set to run on 12 threads. The GPU load was measured and logged via AIDA64 and GPU-Z by running a tri loop of 3DMark Vantage. Maximum temp value for the GPU and average temp off all the cores is used in the chart as data.

Since we are using the same Corsair H100 cooler as with the Carbide 500R case we will compare them results with the above values. CPU temps under load are 6°C hotter. Same counts for the GPU, where there's a 5°C advantage for the Corsair again. But keep in mind that the Corsair Carbide 500R has got two 120mm front fans and a big 200mm sidepanel fan to cool down the installed hardware. But in defence of the Corsair case the Hornet sucked in fresh outside air to cool down the CPU. While the Corsair had to work with the case's ambient air. If we want to play fair we could have installed two extra sidepanel fans and retest. But we rather use what's in the box and not what could have been in the box. So not that bad temperature results as the air flow of the front fan is seriously obstructed. I wonder what it would be like with a major overhaul of the front.

Noise wise this is a very silent case, the two used fans are barely audible. In fact it is the noise generated by the Corsair H100 that has the upper hand. A big step forward from the noisy Enermax Vegas fan !

The Xilence Black Hornet case left me with some mixed feelings. The feature list is huge. I like the top docking station a lot. The hot removable loading trays are nice to have onboard. But not a must have feature to me. As the docking station already allows me to rapidly insert a HDD and then quickly store the required data. The hot swappable design, just adds up to the price of this Black Hornet case. Okay some users might need it, I certainly don't see the need.

I wonder if it wouldn't have been better to just use a fixed cage with possibility to use 4 or 5 HDD's. This way we could maximise the airflow from the front fan. All the components would really benefit from this alternative approach. In it's current state, I look at it as a really a major design flaw. This case could have had a lot more going for it. This if the R&D team would have looked into it. Since the original Hoplite case distributed by Enermax, already dated back from mid early year, I wonder what has really changed.

They added a USB3.0 connector to be plugged into the motherboard, plus cool feature is that there's still the possibility to plug it into a USB2.0 port. Great, so no longer a requirement for routing that USB cable via the rear. The noisy front fan has been replaced by a near silent 140 red LED fan. The rear brackets are screwable, redesigned and painted red. And beside some cosmetic changes, that's were it ends.

Don't get me wrong here. The Black Hornet still packs some great potential. It has decent cooling capacities,  when adding a few more fans for better airflow. The GPU compatibility is more than adequate. But at a price of close to 90 euros I expected a bit better build quality and far better out of the box cooling. Maybe the docking station and/or the two hot swappable trays can justify the price for some. Storage wise this case leaves no options open and.  I rather would have liked the focus to be somewhere else. The competition at this price level in the year 2012 is killing. Luckily the black and red theme gives it a scorching hot look and the esthetic design is well executed. Thank you for reading and catch you all later.

PROS :

• Docking station for 2.5 and 3.5" HDD's
• USB2.0/3.0 connector
• Very silent in operation
• Optional fan positions
• Watercooling support
• Two Hot Swappable loading trays (for some)
• Pro Black and Red Theme

CONS :

• Limited front air flow
• Fragile HDD cage
• Hot swappable trays not locking properly

I wish to thank Bastian from JET Computer.de  for the Black Hornet sample.