Introduction
It’s that awesome time of the year again when NZXT bestow upon the industry another premium grade chassis solution, this time with the release of their H440. The H440 is the latest entry into their H series, and somewhat of a sequel to their truly epic H630. The H440 borrows heavily from the design of the H630, in fact from a distance it may be pretty hard to tell them apart, but NZXT said they’ve gone all out on this new model to bring us a wave of innovations that will offer something fresh to the market.
Just like the H630, the new H440 is focused on super clean looks and whisper quiet performance, its been packed out with sound proofing material, thick panels, extensive ventilation options and high quality fans. It’s designed to help keep the noise down from modern gaming rigs, which as we all know can get a little loud, especially when air-cooled and we’ve got our graphics settings dialled all the way up to 11. Not to be left behind the pace, the chassis has been designed to be competent at air cooling, but comes fully capable of some seriously hefty water cooling too.
As you can see from the specifications below, this chassis is packed full of features; There is room for six 3.5″ drives and two 2.5″ drives in a 6+2 format, although you could just install eight 2.5″ drives if you wish. Every air intake is filtered, there is a staggering four fans pre-installed, with three 120mm fans in the front and a 140mm in the back, plus they’re all the newest high quality NZXT fan, so performance from these should be superb. GPU clearance is huge, and the chassis will support anything from mini-ITX to ATX motherboards. The only noticeable omission here is that there are no 5.25″ drive bays, which NZXT say allows room for large front radiators and a small external form factor without sacrificing on motherboard size.
With all that out of the way, we really want to get inside and take a closer look at what this chassis has to offer, so let’s get right to it and see if this chassis really is as good as it sounds. Firstly we have to mention that the chassis sample we have came in a plain brown box, not the retail packaging, so we will skip over that part and see what we had in the box. There was a small box with all the major fitting components such as high quality screws, a huge collection of cable ties, and a metallic NZXT sticker for the chassis, so you can choose if you would like to sport the logo on the front panel or leave it looking clean.
I really like this chassis but the lack of a couple of 5.25″ slots could be a deal breaker for many, myself included.
How is this a review? How does it compare in terms of temps? Noise levels etc?….Great overview by all means but as for review? lol
Really nice looking chassis with a clean look. Love the sleek lines. But taking the 5.25″ drive out was silly. There are still many times when one needs to load something from optical media. Adding an external device will just destroy the clean look. Shame really.
True, there are times when you need a DVD. But you could just take the side panel off, pop in the SATA cable and drive, use the media then remove it again. I doubt the average user will need to install something from optical media more than once every few months.
True that could be done. But it seems to be a lot of trouble for what is essentially not a cheap case, while comparable cases have one ready to go.
Removing the optical bays allowed them to achieve that clean design without a door…
You can also get an external dvd burner for $20. Who cares if it doesn’t have one. I haven’t used one in years
What about people that want to use custom water cooling, and would rather use a 5.25″ Bay Res, instead of a 150 or 240 tube Res, they no longer have that option
I don’t want to use water cooling. Will this case be good for air cooling? I really really like red/black to go with my theme and I want a window and good airflow.