Assembly

Installing the board is done traditionally with the use of spacers and screws. There is still plenty of space to work with after doing so, and the tower cooler from Noctua fits just fine. You may hide most of the cables under the mainboard tray, but as we will see, when everything is installed, those two holes are not sufficient to avoid a cable mess completely. Also worth mentioning are the rubber covers of these two openings. While a great little addition, they are so loose, that they can easily be pushed out by cabling. I had to reinsert one of them three times during this review.


To install an optical drive, you are required to pull off the front of the chassis and push out the desired metal mesh cover. They are all protected with dust filters, so dirt may not enter through this end either. Once the bay is open, slide in the drive and lock it in place with the plastic locks. This mechanism is ok, but allows for a tad bit of movement of the drive, so you may want to use a single screw on the opposite side to pin it down completely.


The hard drive installation is screw-less as long as you do not decide to pull out the cage. Just place the plastic rails on each side of the drive and slide it in until it snaps into place - quick and simple.


Installing the PSU is nothing out of the ordinary, as it is done with the supplied screws.


Once all the components are installed, you can clearly see that there is still plenty of cable mess we could not hide properly. Sure, the two openings in the mainboard tray help and you may use the two supplied cable clips to reduce this mess a tad bit as well.

Finished Looks

Once the side panels were placed back on the chassis, we turned on the Tempest EVO. The two rows of LEDs powering the front strips looks quite nifty and the LED fans in the front and side add to the overall "wow" effect. The Tempest EVO manages the same light show as the original Tempest, but inches a bit above the original by utilizing four LEDs to light the white bladed fan instead of lighting an entire clear cooling fan. You can als clearly see the lighting shine through the rear of the case, which add the benefit of seeing something at a dark LAN party when needing to plug something into the rear of the case.


Overall the Tempest EVO looks great. One thing we need to be clear about is the noise level. Six fans are loud. Even if you plug four of them into the mainboard and run them at the lowest possible setting, two will have to be connected to the PSU and will run at full speed. NZXT should offer the Tempest EVO with one of their fan controllers, as you are bound to need one if you want to run a quiet system.