A Closer Look - Inside

You can easily gain access to the inside of the chassis by removing a pair of thumb screws on each panel. The interior layout is intended to accommodate even the largest GPUs as the hard drive cage is placed on the very bottom of the case. This is definitely one of the biggest benefits of this chassis, as most mATX ones limit you in the choice and length of graphic cards. Turning things around, we have a large opening below the CPU area of the mainboard. This should give you easy access to any cooler backplate. I am a bit surprised to see such a large hole, as it reduces the overall strength of the chassis. A smaller hole would have done the job as well. NZXT has pre-routed most of the cables to the appropriate locations.


As mentioned before the two hard drive bays are located on the floor of the chassis, right behind the 120 mm front intake fan. Above the gap for large graphic cards you will find four external drive bays. The 3.5 inch variants can be used for hard drives as well.


Turning our focus to the rear of the interior, the PSU bay is located on the very bottom. There are simple foam pads in place to reduce any vibration of the power supply being passed on to the case itself. As you can see, the opening below the PSU is rather small, so the 120 mm fan within the supply will not get full access to clean air. This should not pose any problem at all, but may mean that the fan will spin faster as it needs to keep things cool. NZXT has placed their signature black mesh covers on each of the expansion bays. These are reusable and are held in place by thumb screws. Above that is the space for a small 80 or 92 mm fan and the two water cooling holes mentioned before.


The top fan simulates the air flow usually created by a top mounted PSU. While there is space for two such fans, NZXT has only included a single one. This reduces overall cost and is perfectly adequate for the consumer.


There are quite a few connectors within the case to get all the functionality. First off, there is the fan controller. It connects to a Molex plug from your PSU and allows you to control two pairs of fans with the two dials found in front of the chassis. The I/O cables are all black and are nothing out of the ordinary, but NZXT has chosen to use a Molex connector to light up the power LED instead of the usual mainboard header. Then there are two proprietary connectors to toggle the lighting of the fans on or off.