A Closer Look - Inside

To gain access to the interior of the Guardian 921, simply remove the two thumb screws. Turning the windowed side panel over, the clear center fan can be seen. It features both, a Molex and mainboard header connector, so it is up to you as to how you want to power the unit. The general interior layout is in fact nothing out of the ordinary. I would even go as far as to be a tad bit dissapointed, as the Guardian 921 costs are similar to the Lancool enclosures. Turning the case over reveals a solid mainboard tray, which cannot be removed. Many manufacturers tend to cut out the area under the CPU socket, so that you do not have to remove the entire mainboard when wanting to install CPU coolers which require a plate for mounting. NZXT has chosen to skip this step.


The hard drive bays have been turned 90 degrees to allow the installation of larger graphic cards. A 120 mm fan pushes cold air from the front directly over the hard drives. We have seen this exact interior layout in other cases before, and the hard drives are not really the problem. Instead the two external 3.5 inch bays will become inaccessible when using a large graphics card. Above these bays is the cage which may hold up to three 5.25 inch devices. By default you may install five, but due to the front design of the chassis, the two top bays are blocked from the exterior. You may still use them for internal units, like hard drives with the addition of some 3.5 to 5.25 inch rails.


Moving our focus to the rear interior, starting at the bottom, the seven expansion bays covers are held in place by black plastic locks. These may suffice for smaller cards, but large GPUs will not hold in place with these. The rear fan is of the standard kind, without any LEDs. It may also be connected directly to the PSU with the use of the Molex connector or plugged in directly into the mainboard. The PSU bay is nothing out of the ordinary, with a little ledge to hold the unit in place.


To install external drives, you will need to pull off the front of the Guardian 921. This leaves you with the bare case. NZXT kindly included a 5.25" to 3.5" drive bay adapter, but interestingly enough, routed the front LED, power and LCD cabled straight through the unit into the chassis. This means that I had to remove the cables from the case, to take out the plastic adapter.