There was a point maybe 7 to 10 years ago where NZXT was the king of PC cases.
They provided stylish and compact PC cases that everybody basically copied.
But styles come and go and it can be tough to remain the top dog forever. So
NZXT has sponsored this video today for us to show off their new H2 Flow SFFF PC
case that is supposed to have a focus on compatibility as well as a small desk
footprint. But looking at it, it's not that small form factor. It's almost in
the uh like medium form factor area, especially with its size, which is at
20.7 L. Some people like to draw the small form factor line at 20 L. So, this
is going a little bit over, but look at this dinky little look at that. Okay,
maybe it is a little small, especially when you consider the footprint on your
desk. As you can see, this is all the space it's going to take up. One of the
issues I have with my small form factor case at home is that it ends up taking
almost the entire depth of my desk once all of the cables are involved. So
having something that's a little bit shorter is going to actually maybe save you a lot of space because your desk,
you want table space. The vertical space might not be so bad. For the case side
panel, it's split into two. A small tempered glass window as well as this
very quite porous mesh on the other half. And this same kind of mesh is
found on the front, the back, and the
top of the case. Clearly NZXT is taking a lot of their airflow complaints to
heart. And this thing looks very promising with just literally mesh on
every front. There's no additional magnetic fan filters, which is I think
okay in a scenario where you have this dense of a mesh. Look at how easy I've just taken off all of the panels. This
isn't going to be too hard to clean, which I think is okay with this level of
mesh. And I popped all of the side panels off. Super easy cuz they're all
just attached with detents detents. So
honestly, this seems pretty easy to work in, especially as far as small form
factor cases go. Let's just get these accessories out of here before we take
too much of a closer look. In the accessory box, we get some zip ties as
well as screws for your motherboard, power supply, and case fans. Pretty
simple load out there. Out of the box, you have two 120 mm fans at the top
blowing hot air up and out of the case. We also have your front IO in here,
which is uh quite long for a small form
factor case. It's they only have to get to here really, and they're going to be
way longer, which is nice. that's going to be a little bit easier to work with, but might be a little bit hard to hide
the cables. So,
for front IO, we have two USBA ports and a USBC running at 20 Gbits per second
and a combo headphone microphone jack. Also included is a Gen 5 riser cable,
which is pretty nice for a PC case at this price point. Mounting for fans and
or radiator at the front. This supports up to 60 mm of depth between your fans
and your radiator. And that front radiator mount comes out for easy
installation with captive screws. Super
nice feature. And at the bottom, we have a removable 2.5 inch drive cage with
that is toolless at least for the drives, but not for the removability.
The observant or biologically minded amongst you may have noticed that there is a spine in the middle of this case,
which indicates that this is a sandwich style case. So, your motherboard and
power supply are going to be on this side, and your graphics card will be on
this side. This case can support triple slot GPUs up to 330 millimeters in
length. Heightwise, you're not going to be too worried. One of their claims is
that it's going to be very easy to build in. So, if you're somebody who's not experienced with SFFF parts, you should
have an easy time. Let's find out if that is true. No such thing as an easy
case to build in when it comes to SFFF.
Um, turns out our motherboard was broken. So, we're going to do things a
little out of order. Hopefully, this will be a real test of how easy it is to
build in here. We're going to start with putting our power supply in. This is a NZXT C850 SFX gold power supply. We
figured, you know, keep it all in the family. Also sponsored by NZXT, so
they're so cute. I love SFX power supply. One thing that they did here that I love is that they didn't just
label the type of screw. They actually labeled what it's for. It can be really
hard to tell the difference between like a motherboard standoff screw or a power
supply screw. They're very, very similar. So, shout out to NZXT for doing
that. Since we got some time, we are going to swap out our fans. The included
fans, nothing wrong with them. I would usually keep them because that's how you
can save a little bit of money. But we thought it'd be fun to show off these
F240X fans. They're like a dual fan in a
single frame. They got some nice RGB. And these are high performance fans.
They use liquid crystal polymer. These can spin really fast. And unlike many
fans that are just 25 mm, these are 30 mm in depth, which helps with even more
static pressure and performance. They even have a caution signal. High
velocity fan keep hands and objects clear during operation. I I Captain,
does it support 30 millimeter fans in the top? We're gonna find out.
Something to note, especially when you're doing your cable management, is that to access the PCIe slot covers, you
do have to get inside of the case. So,
there's going to be a decent amount of cables probably hanging out around here. We're going to do our best to keep those
out of our way to keep our case serviceable. The PCIe cable has to do
this kind of weird bend because it has to do this like 90° turn to get flat
here. And you really don't want to compress PCIe cables. They're very
delicate, especially the Gen 5 ones. So, I am a little worried. I might hate
myself for this, but we're going to go ahead and install the GPU. But, we're
just going to try and be delicate and uh hope for the best.
Good news, our motherboard's here. Let's get this done before we get any further
into here, cuz the amount of cables in this thing already getting kind of
scary. >> Guess what? You can win basically the PC we're building right now, but just a
little bit better by signing up for the giveaway that NZXT is having for their
new H2 flow case. It's going to be sick. It's going to have an Intel Core Ultra 9285K and RTX 5080 and it comes with
Windows 11 home. Can you believe it? Entries will be accepted from February
17th to March 3rd, and you can learn more about it in the link in the
description. For our CPU, we are going with a Intel Core Ultra 265K. That's
right. When's the last time you've seen Intel on this channel? Huh? This motherboard's crazy. It's doing the sort
of daughterboard thing that we've seen on a lot of ITX cases, but like look, there's a fan header, two RGB headers.
This is for a M.2 drive. There's going
to be a second there's like a daughter board in here. How' you do that? And
that's where your front panel connectors are.
For our RAM, we're going with 32 gigs of very fast CL26,000
mega transfers per second RAM. That's really speedy. This is a I'm going to
steal this
CPU cooler is freaking chongus. Look at this. Look
at this thing. Like look at our motherboard. It's like the whole thing.
This is the NZXT Kraken Elite 280 RGB
and it comes with dual frame fans just like the ones that we have in the box.
These, however, are just 25mm, but they are more RGB focused. Because they're
not attached out of the box, why don't we swap for the performance fans just to show you how much clearance you can get.
This is a 27 mm thick radiator. That's
going to be a 30 mm fan, which is going to take us right up to our clearance
level of 60 mm for the front radiator. And if you want to do air cooling, NZXT
designed this case with liquid cooling in mind. And 75 mm here is not a lot.
You'll have to stick to like a low profile CPU cooler or go liquid. Oh boy,
the included NZXT cable on this cooler is very long. But the neat thing is that
they are using a single connector that's going to have your RGB, your power,
everything for your fan. So you don't have to deal with any like gross cables plugging into this head, which again is
freaking massive. Finally getting our motherboard in. So far so good. It's
been pretty easy to work in here. Again, lots of space, easy access. All the
panels come off, so we haven't really had to concern ourselves with trying to
get around any tricky corners. And looking ahead right now, just for when I
have to do cable management and stuff, it's going to be pretty easy for me to route the CPU connector that I totally
forgot to connect beforehand, which is a pro tip. something you should do. Oh,
they even have a little hole right here so you can reach a screwdriver through
to screw in that last motherboard standoff. I don't have a thin enough
screwdriver cuz we got thick shafts over here at LMG. We're about to put the
radiator in and it is getting uh pretty nightmarish in here. We have a lot of
extra long cables that are designed for fulls size cases and we're in a small case. Thankfully, NZXT kind of
thoughtfully designed around that big extra part on their radiator. So, it
does fit in just nicely, especially in the optimal orientation that we have
here. As I said, you can do your best to make it as easy
as possible, but there's no way to make it
truly truly easy when it comes to SFFF. There's always some frustrations, but it
will feel oh so satisfying when it's all done. We got everything in here. It's
been lightly cable managed. Not the prettiest thing in the world, but, you
know, gets the job done. Let's find out if it works.
Oh. Oo, look at the CPU cooler. We'll
have to rotate it 90° in the software, but like jeez, that's such a big screen.
And finally,
what the hell is What the hell is that?
Yeah. Oh.
Oh, there's a residue. I hope that that
Oh, I'm making it so much worse. NZXT,
don't look at this. It's a darkened side panel and I think that that kind of
really does a lot for covering up the inevitable cable clutter that you're
going to have in here. It almost makes me wish we didn't route our tubes around
the CPU cooler so that we could show off our RGB RAM, but it looks pretty cool.
Overall thoughts on this thing, it's pretty neat. It is relatively easy to
build in. The mesh plus the darkened
tempered glass side panel make it a little bit easier to hide your cables
and really let your RGB shine through. Instead, the airflow looks like it's not
going to be any sort of problem. We currently have it pulling in through the front and exhausting out the top, but
you also have tons of passive dispersion
through the back. There is nowhere to mount any fans here. What would have
been cool, but I understand why they didn't do it, but you're probably going to see modders do it, is if mounting
like some small like 40 or 50 mm fans to the side here. In terms of GPUs that it
can accommodate, if you have a flowth through GPU, you might find that you
your temps are a little bit hampered, but there is about 15 mm of clearance between the back panel and the actual
GPU itself, which in other cases has been enough to provide decent
ventilation that doesn't choke people off. We actually have a video coming on LT that we did with NASA that may or may
not confirm that you should be okay with a flowthrough cooler. Uh we still have a
decent amount of room for a larger GPU. We got a little bit of extra length,
just a little bit, as well as more height. The trade-off you're making for
having the smaller footprint on your desk is that you have a kind of taller tower, but it looks classy enough. It's
kind of got the iconic very square angular look of NZXT. In terms of things
that could be improved though, I really only have a couple of small things. One
is that it would be more cable tie mounts on the back side of the
motherboard and shorter IO cables. The
uh front IO cables are just really long and end up being quite a burden to deal
with. It's pretty sick and at 150 bucks, it's a very competitive for an SFX case.
It's not the smallest case, but if you're somebody who has some larger
components, especially GPUs, um it's
going to be easier to transition to this instead of spending a lot of money on
finding like the very few uh models that will fit in like a
Fractal Terra. At this point, clear to me that a lot of thought has been put into this case, even down to like where
the GPU is mounted. There's enough vertical space that you can have larger
HDMI and DisplayPort connectors without having like scary tight bends.
Especially if it's a computer that you're going to be dragging. Sometimes you can really, really ruin DisplayPort
cables and or even the ports on your GPU. This one has thought about that.
It's thought about where you're going to put all of your components. It's a really nice case. Looks really slick.
It's really cool to see NZXT coming back and and smashing it. Honestly,
unsponsored opinion, I'll say that much. Thank you, NZXT, for sponsoring. And
thank you for watching. If you enjoyed this, why don't you check out uh some of
the short circuits we've done on some NZXT accessories. Those were also pretty
neat.