Spire X2 6018 XMOD Chassis Review

Overall I do like the X2 it looks pretty good, it performs pretty good and it’s got some nice features and build quality that make it a reliable product for most low to mid range builds, but it’s not without its flaws and I can’t brush over those too easily.

The front panel features room for a lot plenty of 5.25″ drives, I would have prefered this to be less to make room for an extra air intake fan as the ability to have one in, three out creates a negative air pressure, a common cause of a dusty system interior. Then we have the dust filter in the bottom that really should be on the outside of the chassis as mounting the PSU over it makes it difficult to access and maintain.

The internal divider is all but pointless and while it could be used to channel air a little I don’t feel its required and it looks out of place through the side panel window. The rear guard on the cable routing isn’t very deep and even for my limited build I had to leave it off, it just wouldn’t screw into place with my PSU cables running through it, it’s a nice feature, but it could have been better and if you’re going to have cable routing holes you absolutely must have space behind the motherboard to route the cables as stuffing the to one side is not what I call managing them.

Ok so that’s pretty much everything I didn’t like about this chassis, so why do I still like it? Well it does look great and dare I say better than most in the sub £50 catagory, it’s nice to see a good quality side panel window, some cable management (even if it is very basic), a nicely designed front panel (in terms of appearance), a fantastic top panel with removable cover and I really love that they’ve included a big dial to adjust the built-in fan controller, that’s a most welcome feature. I also like that they’ve done something different with the expansion slot mounting clips, they work really well and I hope to see this design used again in the future, I’m also impressed that I got my H100i in there, although I wouldn’t recommend that you try, as it really was cutting it close.

So it really is a mixture of good and bad with the X2, it falls short of one of our awards but it doesn’t miss out on a recommendation from me as you can do a lot worse on a tight budget, but you can rarely do better, it’s capable of holding a moderately powerful system, a couple of graphics cards and the fan controller should help you balance performance and noise nicely. Overall it may not be perfect, but it’s not without its merits either.