my first look at the nzxth1 was as part of a fully integrated gaming system but
it's actually available standalone or well sort of
nzxt sponsored this video where we're going to be showing you guys how
to build your own system inside the nzx th1
or at least part of your own system unlike most
cases on the market the h1 comes with some of the parts some of the especially
trickier parts pre-installed so it's basically kind of like those um
you know those like uh food delivered to your door things it's like yeah here's
all the ingredients all you gotta do is kind of slap them together
oh look at that we've got a disc plate on the door now it's not centered
the idea of creating small form factor compact sort of bare bones machines has
been around forever in fact i still remember the
look on my face when i discovered that so much of ncix's web infrastructure was
running off of a whole bunch of socket 478 and socket a
shuttle bare bones machines like this is back probably 15 years ago
and even the idea of making a gaming machine that is sort of partly
pre-assembled where the user just adds you know let's say CPU RAM and storage
is nothing new but what's different here is that nzxt has actually taken out
some of the things that would traditionally be included in a bare
bones so all you're getting here is the case
where is it there it is the power supply
an all-in-one cooler so that's a 140 millimeter aio cooler that's going to
handle your CPU and the pci express
riser cables that can be one of the most finicky parts of building a small form
factor machine the cool thing about this approach is that it takes some of the
things that are good about a pre-build like not having to worry too much about
what things work with what other things and some of the good things about a diy
pc which is you can use any brand of motherboard you want any graphics card
you want and you get the satisfaction of putting it together yourself
so behind that plate we've got the modular interface for our graphics card
and you can see that our power cables are also pre-routed and
this is a nice little touch shortened so that you don't have any
excess wires that you're going to need to tuck away so our graphics card is
going to go in right around here and these are going to plug in right here
that's it one thing i confess i had a bit of trouble with last time i looked
at this was getting this panel off but this one just slides off super easily
so i don't know what the deal was there but that's good so that exposes the
actually now that i know how to do it easy to access and easy to clean
magnetic fan filters there we go a little tab under there
where you can pull these off super nice so these handle all the
intake for the system for the all-in-one cooler which is over
on this side the power supply fan which is also on this side and then of course
yep that's my graphics card right there no no no so it'll look
more like that so these are going to be pulling air in directly from outside of
the computer i always like these kinds of clever little things so the GPU
placeholder to make sure that nothing's you know rattling around in here
is also the accessory box there's an extension that's routed down
to ah here it is on the bottom so we'll plug in
right there and then we've also got some zip ties
and cable management stuff how interesting so it's only a single three
and a half mil jack on the top but it appears to be a combo jack so
it's a 4-pole jack and they include a splitter so you can split it out to microphone and headphones
also in here is all the mounting hardware that we're going to need for our CPU cooler whether we swing for the
Intel or AMD team we've got a back plate that covers us and then here's the hold
down hardware and i have no idea what this one's for
we'll figure that out feels like i'm back in the 90s i'm going
on a road trip i like it start tearing this puppy apart
i think the pump may be built into the radiator rather than the CPU block for a
second i'm super confused right now i'm like
crazy confused this doesn't say anything about that there's an all-in-one liquid
cooler already installed remove screws pointed at by arrows
wow that's cool
i am super into that really does look like there's a pump in there or
something oh yeah this is super compact this doesn't have a pump in it wow how
about that that's cool okay well let's just tuck that aside for
now and then we can take out the dummy motherboard
and put in our real one so i've got an rog strix z390i gaming we
could go with something lower end but because we wanted the
type c connector as well as overclocking capabilities for our 9900k
this seemed like a pretty good bet i o
goes down so you're actually going to plug everything in from the bottom of
the case and oh i should probably put a CPU on it
now to install the aforementioned 9900k this is going to be the scariest part
for new builders but it really is this simple you pull the ARM away and up
okay so that gets this clear so you're not going to accidentally touch the pins you just lift that up there
line up the little golden triangle with the dot or the triangle that's on the
socket all right there's also these little notches here it's pretty hard to put it
in wrong if you're paying attention to what you're doing give it a little wiggle make sure it's actually in there
lower this down make sure these are going to slide over that screw or under
it rather and then ARM goes out and under
and your CPU is installed RAM is even simpler we've gone with some vengeance
RGB RAM from Corsair go ahead and pop in
one making sure that the notches are aligned evenly apply pressure from both sides
and we'll do that one more time
it's crazy to think about it but we're almost done with the motherboard at this
point it's that simple we could put our boot drive on the back of the
motherboard here but in this case i actually wouldn't really recommend it
the nand flash doesn't care about hot components nearby but the controller
doesn't really like it and our GPU the back plate of it is going to be right
against the back of the board so instead we're going to go ahead and take this
shield off the front and we'll install the SSD there
pop it in like a sodium hold it down
and screw it in boop don't forget to pull the protective
cover off of the thermal interface material on your heatsink here it's not
going to make a huge difference like it's not going to affect performance or anything but
i mean if you've got it there you might as well at least
have it as like a heat spreader or like a heat
soak and that really and truly is it let's go ahead and pop the motherboard in check
this out so i'm just going to hold these front panel connectors out of the way and
we're going to slide the board in from the side
that's nice too with the i o shield which is integrated into this
motherboard it just sits there where it's supposed to go it's actually held
in place by gravity so now all we got to do is put our
four motherboard screws in wow this is all the screws we need for assembly
that's pretty cool we find motherboard screws in this
little baggie and four of those
the corner braces of the case are in the way a little bit here but it's not the
end of the world as long as you've got a magnetic tip screwdriver it should be all right
probably won't properly
now we're just going to plug in all our motherboard stuff so there's that pci
express riser i really like the way they've designed this so you got your
protective cover get rid of that and then it's got this nice little like
plastic bracket that makes sure that it doesn't curve too much and accidentally
kink and also keeps it out of the way of the panels when you're trying to close them the 8-pin CPU power connector is
pre-wire managed so we just go ahead and pop that in and the 24 pin is done up in
pretty much exactly the same way now my RAM
is a little bit high profile but from looking at it here
it seems like we should still be able to get in there without
peeling the heat spreader off it there we go and it's back in place
and that just goes in or something like that front panel connectors can all be
done now so here's our usb type c hd audio is also down here in the corner
this one's a little bit long but maybe we could cable manage that a touch when we're done this is like the fastest
build ever i like how it stands up like this that means we've still got easy
access to the back of our motherboard to put on our back plate just in case we forgot to do that earlier
well i mean you know that is why they started doing motherboard cutouts right
so you could easily and quickly swap a cooler not so in case you forgot but
anyway i should put the actual hardware on here first oh yes preparation
yes oh interesting this is a system i have
not seen before so it's got like this little keyed thing and then you put it
in there and then i guess you
screw that in looks like the back plate does not go on very easily with these
pegs already attached i will take two of them off
hey there it is now we're just going to slip these little spacers
over all four of the posts this is really clever so it's like this
by default which means you're not going to be able to get at the screw hole but
if you pop them in they've got nice little instructions on here hey make
sure you put those back before you close the system otherwise this tube is going to press up against
here and it might kink all right let's pop this on now for each post we need one more
little plastic washer and then one of these thumb nuts
not much left now along the edge here we've got the RPM wire for our
all-in-one cooler pump as well as our CPU fan so that's the fan that's
connected to the aio and we're pretty much ready to close
that up wow okay tubes towards the outside
okay that was that was a close one uh i would recommend using low profile
memory we did manage to get these in with just a little bit of flex there see
that that's probably still fine but uh if i were you i would i would use
something else that's it for cable management on that
side all the usb and front panel connectors and everything can just sit
right here graphics card wait
how did i not install this bracket oh good that's for AMD
now for the moment you've all been waiting for rtx 2070 super time
so these two little tabs will hold the bottom of a card and i really need it to
just actually like go the in there probably because my motherboard tray is
bowed then we just give it a firm little press and then we can put these thumb
screws back on the bottom of the card that's it like i want to hear from the novices in the comments does this
actually look easier does this still look like kind of overwhelming and
complicated maybe i'm just out of touch wow look at
that it's only 26 steps for our extra PCIe cables up here in that empty two
and a half inch drive bay and then you can just cover it all up buy ugly cables
that's it panel time
nice
i'm not making the mistake of removing this sticker again
i'm just going to leave it there this is one thing that's a bit of a
bummer about this case the fact that you gotta dig around in its
underbelly in order to plug anything in i mean it does have a type c and a usb
type a on the top but um it is an improvement for me now that i
know that that's a 4-pole audio jack and you can just split it out to a
microphone and headphone if you really want let's see if i managed to build a
computer that works
because that's the real trick it can be as easy as it wants until the moment you
press the button and it doesn't work like that uh balls
that's fine you don't close the side panels on a rig
until you've seen it post plug that in there now i just need to see a
logo on the screen go ahead and cut
let's try a simple receipt of our pci express connector okay fine i will reset
the graphics card
wait a second wouldn't that be funny
we spend all this time diagnosing a dead computer and it turns out it's a bad
cable i love that that's my favorite fire this back up
well okay then i even talked about how it's best to try
to troubleshoot the simplest things first do i not have uplay on here i
thought this is my bench drive well shadow of the tomb raider it is then
man i love this when you get a fast CPU and it makes your games download faster
the thing is you're not just downloading raw data a lot of the time you're unpacking it at the same time so
especially having a CPU that can turbo up really high and that handles single
threaded tasks really well can result in faster game downloads it's great i
really gotta actually play this game so that i have like some other save games to load
because i'm just like right at the beginning in this like stupid forced walking around segment i cannot get
motivated to play this one all the way through oh you know what let's just run
the benchmark yeah lots of hours in the benchmark
lots of hours pimping lttstore.com you know
got my priorities straight all high seems like the sweet spot for a config
like this it's a very sightseeing type game so i don't worry too much about
getting 100 plus frames per second but even your lowest dips are still in
the low 50s and we've got g-sync on this panel so those get masked a fair bit as
long as you're not going down too low in a massive surprise to no one the
thermals of our system here behave pretty much the same as the ones in the
pre-built they sent over to us because we we never hit higher than about 45-50
degrees on the CPU i would expect that to stay pretty consistent
ended up putting together a pretty similar system so
the whole paradigm where it's intaking through the filtered sides and then
exhausting just through positive pressure out the back works
really well so you've got like a hands warmer back here
but here you can really feel the inrush of air over the power supply
the CPU cooler and the GPU
now that i'm done i can safely say not everyone is going to prefer the nzxt h1
approach with some of the parts pre-configured but if you wanted to
dip your toes in the water of custom building a machine i would say this is a
much safer way to go than
oh that case that we covered from singularity a little while ago the
easiest water cooled system that ended up actually being extraordinarily
difficult to build i think with some instruction following even a complete
novice builder could finish a system in this in a couple of hours and that is
really impressive if you're looking for a video to watch maybe actually check
out that easiest water cooled one we had a lot of fun doing that build even if it
wasn't as easy or fast as we had hoped