 My first look at the NZXT H1 was as part of a fully integrated gaming system, but it's actually available standalone, or well, sort of. NZXT sponsored this video where we're going to be showing you guys how to build your own system inside the NZXT H1, or at least part of your own system. Unlike most cases on the market, the H1 comes with some of the parts, some of the especially trickier parts, pre-installed. So it's basically kind of like those, you know, those like food delivered to your door things. It's like, yeah, here's all the ingredients. All you gotta do is kind of slap them together. Oh, look at that. We've got a display on the door now. It's not centered. The idea of creating small form factor, compact, sort of bare-bones machines has been around forever. In fact, I still remember the look on my face when I discovered that so much of NCIX's web infrastructure was running off of a whole bunch of socket 478 and socket A shuttle bare-bones machines, like this is back probably 15 years ago. And even the idea of making a gaming machine that is sort of partly pre-assembled where the user just adds, you know, let's say CPU, RAM and storage is nothing new. But what's different here is that NZXT has actually taken out some of the things that would traditionally be included in a bare-bones. So all you're getting here is the case. Where is it? There it is. The power supply, an all-in-one cooler. So that's a 140 millimeter AIO cooler. That's going to handle your CPU and the PCI Express riser cables that can be one of the most finicky parts of building a small form factor machine. The cool thing about this approach is that it takes some of the things that are good about a pre-build, like not having to worry too much about what things work with what other things. And some of the good things about a DIY PC, which is you can use any brand of motherboard you want, any graphics card you want, and you get the satisfaction of putting it together yourself. So behind that plate, we've got the modular interface for our graphics card. And you can see that our power cables are also pre-routed and this is a nice little touch, shortened so that you don't have any excess wires that you're going to need to tuck away. So our graphics card is going to go in right around here and these are going to plug in right here. That's it. One thing I confess I had a bit of trouble with last time I looked at this was getting this panel off, but this one just slides off super easily. So I don't know what the deal was there, but that's good. So that exposes the, actually now that I know how to do it, easy to access and easy to clean magnetic fan filters. There we go. A little tab under there where you can pull these off. Super nice. So these handle all the intake for the system for the all-in-one cooler, which is over on this side, the power supply fan, which is also on this side. And then of course, yeah, that's my graphics card right there. No, no, no. So it'll look more like that. So these are going to be pulling air in directly from outside of the computer. I always like these kinds of clever little things. So the GPU placeholder to make sure that nothing's rattling around in here is also the accessory box. There's an extension that's routed down to, ah, here it is on the bottom. So we'll plug in right there. And then we've also got some zip ties and cable management stuff. How interesting. So it's only a single three and a half mil jack on the top, but it appears to be a combo jack. So it's a four pole jack and they include a splitter. So you can split it out to microphone and headphones. Also in here is all the mounting hardware that we're going to need for our CPU cooler, whether we swing for the Intel or AMD team. We've got a back plate that covers us. And then here's the hold down hardware. And I have no idea what this one's for. Feels like I'm back in the nineties. I'm going on a road trip. I like it. Let's start tearing this puppy apart. I think the pump may be built into the radiator rather than the CPU block. I'm super confused right now. I'm like crazy confused. This doesn't say anything about that. There is an all in one liquid cooler already installed. Remove screws pointed at by arrows. Wow. That's cool. I am super into that. Really does look like there's a pump in there or something. Oh yeah. This is super compact. This doesn't have a pump in it. Wow. How about that? That's cool. Okay. Well, let's just tuck that aside for now. And then we can take out the dummy motherboard and put in our real one. So I've got an ROG Strix Z390i gaming. We could go with something lower end, but because we wanted the type C connector as well as overclocking capabilities for our 9900K, this seemed like a pretty good bet. I.O. goes down. So you're actually going to plug everything in from the bottom of the case. And oh, I should probably put a CPU on it. Now to install the aforementioned 9900K. This is going to be the scariest part for new builders, but it really is this simple. You pull the arm away and up. Okay. So that gets this clear so you're not going to accidentally touch the pins. You just lift that up there. Line up the little golden triangle with the dot or the triangle that's on the socket. All right. There's also these little notches here. It's pretty hard to put it in wrong if you're paying attention to what you're doing. Give it a little wiggle. Make sure it's actually in there. Lower this down. Make sure these are going to slide over that screw or under it rather. And then arm goes out and under and your CPU is installed. RAM is even simpler. We've gone with some Vengeance RGB RAM from Corsair. We go ahead and pop in one, making sure that the notches are aligned. Evenly apply pressure from both sides. And we'll do that one more time. It's crazy to think about it, but we're almost done with the motherboard at this point. It's that simple. We could put our boot drive on the back of the motherboard here, but in this case, I actually wouldn't really recommend it. The NAND flash doesn't care about hot components nearby, but the controller doesn't really like it. And our GPU, the backplate of it, is going to be right against the back of the board. So instead, we're going to go ahead and take this shield off the front and we'll install the SSD there. Pop it in like a sodium. Hold it down and screw it in. Don't forget to pull the protective cover off of the thermal interface material on your heat sink here. It's not going to make a huge difference. Like, it's not going to affect performance or anything, but I mean, if you've got it there, you might as well at least have it as like a heat spreader or like a heat soak. And that really and truly is it. Let's go ahead and pop the motherboard in. Check this out. So I'm just going to hold these front panel connectors out of the way and we're going to slide the board in from this side. Do-dee-do-dee-do-dee-do. That's nice too. With the I.O. shield, which is integrated into this motherboard, it just sits there where it's supposed to go. It's actually held in place by gravity. So now all we got to do is put our four motherboard screws in. Wow, this is all the screws we need for assembly. That's pretty cool. We find motherboard screws in this little baggie. And four of those. The corner braces of the case are in the way a little bit here, but it's not the end of the world. As long as you've got a magnetic tip screwdriver, it should be all right. Probably won't drop any. Now we're just going to plug in all our motherboard stuff. So there's that PCI Express riser. I really like the way they've designed this. So you've got your protective cover, get rid of that. And then it's got this nice little like plastic bracket that makes sure that it doesn't curve too much and accidentally kink and also keeps it out of the way of the panels when you're trying to close them. The 8-pin CPU power connector is pre-wire managed, so we just go ahead and pop that in. And the 24-pin is a little bit more complicated. So we just pop that in and the 24-pin is done up in pretty much exactly the same way. Now my RAM is a little bit high profile, but from looking at it here, it seems like we should still be able to get in there without peeling the heat spreader off it. There we go. And it's back in place. And that just goes in or something like that. Front panel connectors can all be done now. So here's our USB type C. HD audio is also down here in the corner. This one's a little bit long, but maybe we could cable manage that a touch when we're done. This is like the fastest build ever. I like how it stands up like this. That means we've still got easy access to the back of our motherboard to put on our backplate just in case we forgot to do that earlier. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Well, I mean, you know that is why they started doing motherboard cutouts, right? So you could easily and quickly swap a cooler. Not so in case you forgot, but anyway, I should put the actual hardware on here first. Ah, yes. Preparation. Yes. Oui, oui. Oh, interesting. This is a system I have not seen before. So it's got like this little key thing and then you put it in there. And then I guess you screw that in. Looks like the backplate does not go on very easily with these pegs already attached. I will take two of them off. Hey, there it is. Now we're just going to slip these little spacers over all four of the posts. This is really clever. So it's like this by default, which means you're not going to be able to get at the screw hole. But if you pop them in, they've got nice little instructions on here. Hey, make sure you put those back before you close the system. Otherwise, this tube is going to press up against here and it might kink. All right, let's pop this on. Now for each post, we need one more little plastic washer and then one of these thumb nuts. Not much left now along the edge here. We've got the RPM wire for our all-in-one cooler pump as well as our CPU fan. So that's the fan that's connected to the AIO. And we're pretty much ready to close that up. Wow. Okay, tubes towards the outside. Okay, that was a close one. I would recommend using low profile memory. We did manage to get these in with just a little bit of flex there. See that? That's probably still fine. But if I were you, I would use something else. That's it for cable management on that side. All the USB and front panel connectors and everything can just sit right here. Graphics card. Wait, how did I not install this bracket? Oh, good. That's for AMD. Now for the moment you've all been waiting for. RTX 2070 super time. So these two little tabs will hold the bottom of a card. And I really need it to just actually like go the **** in there. Probably because my motherboard tray is bowed. Then we just give it a firm little press. And then we can put these thumb screws back on the bottom of a card. That's it. Like I want to hear from the novices in the comments. Does this actually look easier? Does this still look like kind of overwhelming and complicated? Maybe I'm just out of touch. Wow, look at that. It's only 26 steps for our extra PCIe cables up here in that empty two and a half inch drive bay. And then you can just cover it all up. Bye ugly cables. That's it. Panel time. Nice. I'm not making the mistake of removing this sticker again. I'm just gonna leave it there. This is one thing that's a bit of a bummer about this case. The fact that you gotta dig around in its underbelly in order to plug anything in. I mean, it does have a type C and a USB type A on the top, but it is an improvement for me. Now that I know that that's a four pole audio jack and you can just split it out to a microphone and headphone if you really want to. Let's see if I manage to build a computer that works. Because that's the real trick. It can be as easy as it wants until the moment you press the button and it doesn't work like that. Uh, balls. Boop. That's fine. You don't close the side panels on a rig until you've seen it post. Plug that in there. Now I just need to see how it works. Plug that in there. Now I just need to see the logo on the screen. Go ahead and cut. Let's try a simple reseat of our PCI Express connector. Okay, fine. I will reseat the graphics card. Wait a second. Wouldn't that be funny? You spend all this time diagnosing a dead computer and it turns out it's a bad cable. I love that. That's my favorite. Fire this back up. Well, okay then. I even talked about how it's best to try to troubleshoot the simplest things first. Do I not have Uplay on here? I thought this is my bench drive. Well, Shadow of the Tomb Raider it is then. Man, I love this. When you get a fast CPU and it makes your games download faster. The thing is you're not just downloading raw data. A lot of the time you're unpacking it at the same time. So especially having a CPU that can turbo up really high and that handles single threaded tasks really well can result in faster game downloads. It's great. I really got to actually play this game so that I have some other saved games to load. Because I'm just like right at the beginning in this like stupid forced walking around segment. I cannot get motivated to play this one all the way through. Oh, you know what? Let's just run the benchmark. Yeah, lots of hours in the benchmark. Lots of hours pimping lttstore.com, you know. Got my priorities straight. All high seems like the sweets bought for a config like this. It's a very sight see type game. So I don't worry too much about getting 100 plus frames per second. But even your lowest dips are still in the low 50s. And we've got G-Sync on this panel. So those get masked a fair bit as long as you're not going down too low. In a massive surprise to no one, the thermals of our system here behave pretty much the same as the ones in the pre-built they sent over to us. Because we never hit higher than about 45, 50 degrees on the CPU. I would expect that to say pretty consistent. And then I'm putting together a pretty similar system. So the whole paradigm where it's intaking through the filtered sides and then exhausting just through positive pressure out the back works really well. So you've got like a hands warmer back here. But here you can really feel the inrush of air over the power supply, the CPU cooler, and the GPU. Now that I'm done, I can safely say not everyone is going to prefer the NZXT H1 approach with some of the parts pre-configured. But if you wanted to dip your toes in the water of custom building a machine, I would say this is a much safer way to go than all that case that we covered from Singularity a little while ago. The easiest water-cooled system that ended up actually being extraordinarily difficult to build. I think with some instruction following, even a complete novice builder could finish a system in this in a couple of hours. And that is really impressive. If you're looking for a video to watch, maybe actually check out that easiest water-cooled one. We had a lot of fun doing that build even if it wasn't as easy or fast as we had hoped.