the h440 from NZXT comes packed pretty unexceptionally yours will of course
have a picture on the side of the box but other than that you got some styrofoam unexceptional styrofoam would
have liked to see better styrofoam but this is the usual rig moral let's move
on to the case itself the h440 is a quiet optimized case they're going for a
clean classy overall aesthetic and actually considering the price very very
solid build quality so we'll start at the front of the case where you've got
well okay you've got a clean aesthetic so you've got kind of a little pattern
here that we've seen on H series cases before and other than that you've got a
completely blank front with a tiny little NZXT logo down at the very very
bottom when you move over to the right hand side panel you find ah yes more
blank more empty just one little black accent line you've also got access to
some of the vents for the front now this case is not as airf flow optimized as I
would like even for a silent case all you've got on the front are these vents
right here some access from the bottom to fresh air and then all you've got on
the top are a couple of vents I think it
was at the back yeah there's a there's some ventilation at the back and then
there's some ventilation on the left hand side and that is pretty much it
when you consider that there's up to two 140 mm or three 120 MIM fans in each of
these locations it really doesn't feel like enough to me but that's not to say
that your system is going to overheat it's just that those fans will be a
little bit on the starved side so let's move around to the left hand side where you can see the ventilation I was
talking about before an extremely nice looking side panel window I mean look at
that you can't see the power supply this is something we've been seeing as an
aftermarket mod for quite some time encasing the power supply and something
really clean and Sleek looking you've also got an illuminated ncxt logo that
you actually don't have to leave lit up if you don't want to there is a switch
on the back that allows you to turn that on and off this also has the added sort
of value ad here of there you go Illuminating the rear eyeo almost the
entire back of the case can be lit up so you can see what you're doing in the
dark and uh you can also have sort of like a neat rear glow sort of effect of
your system if you want okay also on the back we've got a 120 mm or 140 mm fan
Mount and this is something NZXT has been doing for a while with their
slidable fan Mount so you can have the fan up a little bit higher a little bit
lower this will help you not interfere with other components such as tall vrm
heat sinks on a motherboard you can also see that it's seven PCI slots you've got
those stupid grommets that I have no idea why anyone keeps including and then
finally your power supply at the bottom you've also got those vents that I was
talking about in the back and that pretty much wraps things up for the outside except for the top IO so it has
two USB 2.0 ports two USB 3.0 ports headphone and a microphone jacks as well
as a power switch and a reset switch now let's open her up and find out where the
magic truly is well one thing that's magical is the fact that in almost as
many places as they could NZXT has gone
and included these little retainers for their thumb screws so that when you take
the screw out of the side panel or when you unscrew it it doesn't fall out and
you don't lose it the next thing that's magical is this is feels like actual
neoprene on the inside so they seem to be using a very very dense foam for the
sound dampening material on the inside of the case it is a little bit bulkier
than the bitman for example that fractal design uses but it has a very nice
quality feel to it it's a little bit spongy um and I obviously I'd need an
anaco chamber or something if I was going to test the actual efficacy of it
but um it at least looks and feels good Cable Management looks exceptional right
so you've got this bottom compartment where it's hiding the power supply and
all the power supply cables even though it's a modular power supply there are quite a few cables plugged in as you
guys would be able to see if I could show you that so it's nice to have that
hidden away there's two 2 and a half in SSD mounts down here that are handled by
a single thumb screw then you actually screw the drive onto the sled slide it
back and they've got cable management holes specifically for those and for any
bottom cables that you want to Route such as the uh front IO or your USB 2 or
your front panel audio all that kind of good stuff on this side we've got
another thing that we've seen as an aftermarket mod quite a few times in the
last couple of years and this is a a stealth cover for all the where normally
you'd have 5 and a/4 in Bays I wish that they had made this a little bit
stealthier uh they could have done it fairly easily by just putting another
panel here but that would have added additional cost so it's the kind of
thing that you could easily put on as an aftermarket option but there you have it
at any rate that's there so instead of having any 5 and a/ qu inch Bay this
case is all 3 and 1 half inch Bays here in the front which I'll show you from
the back in a moment or radiator mounting options and then you've got
your two SSD cages right here so let's contrast what the front looks like you
got your cable management grommets right here and you know all your drives hidden
away behind a stealth cover and ah yes the back of the case so the thing about
that thick foam you can see that there's a lot of indentations here in it from
when I slid it onto the case the thing about that thick foam is that it takes
up a lot of space behind the motherboard tray that you would normally be able to
use for cable management so even though
I like I thought that I had a ton of space back here because it looks like
well over a centimeter of space at every stage and then it actually widens back
here where the 24 pin needs to come down I really didn't have that much space and
you're going to need to make use of all the Ting bajillion little Cable
Management hooks that exist on the back of the motherboard trade the good news is that you have them so I was able to
tidy things up enough fairly easily just with a couple of uh twist ties that I
was able to close the thing up without any difficulty also here on the back of
the case we have an 11 Port fan power
splitter this is awesome love to see that I wish that it was also fan control
even if it was just something like a switch that I had to reach into the inside to do I mean I guess what you
could do is you could probably mod it and it's just a simple Molex power input
so you could mod it and change the power in to 7vt or something like that but
either way this thing is absolutely awesome so it's got one one intake or
one input on fan one I believe it is and then you can have 10 fans come off of it
so so sorry 10 10 fan power splitter um
the only thing I don't like about it is that if you add any other fans so the 31
20 mm fans that are included in the front are reasonably quiet the 1 140 mm
fan in the back is reasonably quiet but
any fans that you add will be running at full speed if you run them off this so
it would have been nice to see them able to be controlled now something I didn't do when I was actually building the
system and I just realize now is take off the front panel the panel both the
front and the top are quite a bit heavier than they actually appear due to
the metal construction and as well as the neoprene foam so that gives you
access to the magnetic fan filter as well as the 3 120 mm fans in the front
so you can do up to two triple radiators in this thing natively without any
difficulty or you can opt instead for dual 140 mm or 280 mm radiators up here
we've got the little control the little power module for the built-in logo
illumination as well as the IED and all that good stuff and then other than that
it's pretty bog standard back here except well for these hard drive cages
so ncxt has gotten away from the whole plastic hard drive tray thing
unfortunately theyve only included five of them so natively the case only
accepts seven or eight 2 and 1/2 in drives cuz there's one more Mount hiding
down here in the bottom or three 2 and 1/2 in drives and five 3 and 1/2 in
drives in these trays they have permanently attached the little rubber
grommets to them for noise and vibration isolation and there's actually one other
thing I didn't really like about them and that's the fact that when you slide
them in there's no real rails for them to sit on the entire time like they're
just free until you slide them all the way in and then they hook onto the other
side so there's two thumb screws at the back of each one you loosen that and
then once you pull it out these are great again these thumb screws don't come out on their own so they'll they'll
actually stay in there so once you pull it out it just swings freely until you
pop it into the little spot on the other side of that uh that stealth cover over
there so I love to see a return to Quality with metal Drive cages instead
of plastic ones but I wouldn't have minded seeing a little bit more of a of
of a solid support for it now I understand why they did these two things
so less support as well as fewer Drive
cages does give you more ventilation so that front those front fans at least if
they're going to be choked by the front panel they might as well not be choked
by the uh the hard drive cages behind them so I can see their point in doing
this it's just not necessarily something that I 100% agree with inside this
little NZXT box of accessories we find all of the screws that we will need as
well as a little NZXT sticker nothing truly exceptional in there oh yeah nice
big CPU uh cutout so you're going to be able to access your CPU socket pretty
much no matter what and then I did have one other complaint about the case
although this is a fairly minor thing so I've got an ax1200i in here and the
modular interface is pretty hard to get at because you can't actually it seems
remove oh no wait uh no yeah it's riveted in so you can't actually remove
that stealth cover on the front of the case it's a little bit hard to get at
your modular interface in here especially once you have a bunch of cables plugged in but this is a minor
complaint because it's the kind of thing that you really won't have to deal with
all that often so all the io and all the cables are attached to the top of the
case here there you go very very simple very very clean so the way that you um
that you sort of get at the top is to just pop this off and then there's no
wires attached to it or anything like that it's extremely Hefty extremely
solid feeling and then the only ventilation is uh here along this side
and here along the back and it's got more of that neoprene feeling foam on it
you can also see now the h100i that I have installed there you go so we've got
two 120 mm fans and you can actually slide them around depending on exactly
where you want to position them and then you can put a third one here although it should be noted that if you do install a
third fan and radiator here you won't be able to mount the radiator uh this way
around so you can see I have the tubing coming down on this side because that'll
interfere with the top hard drive cage so that'll limit you instead to four
hard drives Four 3 and 1/2 in drives instead of uh 5 3 and 1/2 in drives
although if I was using this case I'd probably be going for like an ultimate
liquid cooling quiet machine or something like that so I'd get some nice
high static pressure fans like n2s I'd
get two triple radiators I'd run them at extremely low RPM and then I'd be able
to basically overclock the snot out of the system inside in spite of the fact
that it's extremely silent you would be limiting your expansion options in terms
of storage though because you'd pretty much be stuck with these two SSD mounts
and then the SSD mount in the bottom the good news about that though is that
there's nothing um limiting the height of these drives and Western Digital has
I believe a 2 tbte 2 and 1/2 inch drive that's a non-standard thickness it's 15
mm or 17 mm thick so that gives you some great options in terms of both SSD and
um mechanical Drive expansion even if you're stuck with a 2 and 1 12 in form
factor I think that pretty much wraps it up guys thank you for checking out my
unboxing and I guess it's a review of the h440 from NZXT don't forget to like
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