 The H440 from NZXT comes packed pretty unexceptionally. Yours will of course have a picture on the side of the box but other than that you got some styrofoam. Unexceptional styrofoam. Would have liked to see better styrofoam but this is the usual rigmarole. Let's move on to the case itself. The H440 is a quiet optimized case. They're going for a clean, classy overall aesthetic and actually considering the price, very very solid build quality. So we'll start at the front of the case where you've got, well okay, you've got a clean aesthetic. So you've got kind of a little pattern here that we've seen on each series cases before and other than that you've got a completely blank front with a tiny little NZXT logo down at the very very bottom. When you move over to the right hand side panel you find, ah yes, more blank, more empty, just one little black accent line. You've also got access to some of the vents for the front. Now this case is not as airflow optimized as I would like even for a silent case. All you've got on the front are these vents right here, some access from the bottom to fresh air and then all you've got on the top are a couple of vents. I think it was at the back. Yeah there's a there's some ventilation at the back and then there's some ventilation on the left hand side and that is pretty much it when you consider that there's up to two 140 millimeter or three 120 millimeter fans in each of these locations. It really doesn't feel like enough to me but that's not to say that your system is going to overheat, it's just that those fans will be a little bit on the starved side. So let's move around to the left hand side where you can see the ventilation I was talking about before an extremely nice looking side panel window. I mean look at that, you can't see the power supply. This is something we've been seeing as an aftermarket mod for quite some time. Encasing the power supply and something really clean and sleek looking you've also got an illuminated NCXT logo that you actually don't have to leave lit up if you don't want to. There is a switch on the back that allows you to turn that on and off. This also has the added sort of value add here. There you go, illuminating the rear I.O. almost the entire back of the case can be lit up so you can see what you're doing in the dark and you can also have sort of like a neat rear glow sort of effect of your system if you want. Okay also on the back we've got a 120 millimeter or 140 millimeter fan mount and this is something NCXT has been doing for a while with their slidable fan mount so you can have the fan up a little bit higher a little bit lower this will help you not interfere with other components such as tall VRM heatsinks on a motherboard. You can also see that it's seven PCI slots you've got those stupid grommets that I have no idea why anyone keeps including and then finally your power supply at the bottom. You've also got those vents that I was talking about in the back and that pretty much wraps things up for the outside except for the top I.O. so it has two USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports headphone and a microphone jacks as well as a power switch and a reset switch. Now let's open her up and find out where the magic truly is. Well one thing that's magical is the fact that in almost as many places as they could NCXT has gone and included these little retainers for their thumbscrews so that when you take the screw out of the side panel or when you unscrew it it doesn't fall out and you don't lose it. The next thing that's magical is this feels like actual neoprene on the inside so they seem to be using a very very dense foam for the sound dampening material on the inside of the case. It is a little bit bulkier than the bitumen for example that fractal design uses but it has a very nice quality feel to it. It's a little bit spongy and obviously I'd need an anechoic chamber or something if I was going to test the actual efficacy of it but it at least looks and feels good. Cable management looks exceptional right so you've got this bottom compartment where it's hiding the power supply and all the power supply cables even though it's a modular power supply there are quite a few cables plugged in as you guys would be able to see if I could show you that. So it's nice to have that hidden away there's two two and a half inch SSD mounts down here that are handled by a single thumbscrew then you actually screw the drive onto the sled slide it back and they've got cable management holes specifically for those and for any bottom cables that you want to route such as the front I.O. or your USB 2 or your front panel audio all that kind of good stuff. On this side we've got another thing that we've seen as an aftermarket mod quite a few times in the last couple of years and this is a stealth cover for all the where normally you'd have five and a quarter inch bays. I wish that they had made this a little bit stealthier they could have done it fairly easily by just putting another panel here but that would have added additional cost so it's the kind of thing that you could easily put on as an aftermarket option but there you have it at any rate that's there. So instead of having any five and a quarter inch bays this case is all three and a half inch bays here in the front which I'll show you from the back in a moment or radiator mounting options and then you've got your two SSD cages right here so let's contrast what the front looks like you got your cable management grommets right here and you know all your hard drives hidden away behind a stealth cover and ah yes the back of the case. So the thing about that thick foam you can see that there's a lot of indentations here in it from when I slid it onto the case. The thing about that thick foam is that it takes up a lot of space behind the motherboard tray that you would normally be able to use for cable management. So even though I like I thought that I had a ton of space back here because it looks like well over a centimeter space at every stage and then it actually widens back here where the 24 pin needs to come down I really didn't have that much space and you're going to need to make use of all the umpteen bajillion little cable management hooks that exist on the back of the motherboard tray. The good news is that you have them so I was able to tidy things up enough fairly easily just with a couple of twist ties that I was able to close the thing up without any difficulty. Also here on the back of the case we have an 11 port fan power splitter this is awesome. Love to see that I wish that it was also fan control even if it was just something like a switch that I had to reach into the inside to do I mean I guess what you could do is you could probably mod it and it's just a simple molex power input so you could mod it and change the power in to 7 volts or something like that but either way this thing is absolutely awesome so it's got one one intake or one input on fan one I believe it is and then you can have 10 fans come off of it so so sorry 10 10 fan power splitter. The only thing I don't like about it is that if you add any other fan so the three 120 millimeter fans that are included in the front are reasonably quiet the one 140 millimeter fan in the back is reasonably quiet but any fans that you add will be running at full speed if you run them off this so it would have been nice to see them able to be controlled. Now something I didn't do when I was actually building the system I just realized now is take off the front panel the panel both the front and the top are quite a bit heavier than they actually appear due to the metal construction and as well as the neoprene foam so that gives you access to the magnetic fan filter as well as those three 120 millimeter fans in the front so you can do up to two triple radiators in this thing natively without any difficulty or you can opt instead for dual 140 millimeter or 280 millimeter radiators. Up here we've got the little control the little power module for the built-in logo illumination as well as the I O LED and all that good stuff and then other than that it's pretty bog standard back here except well for these hard drive cages so NCXT has gotten away from the whole plastic hard drive tray thing unfortunately they've only included five of them so natively the case only accepts seven or eight two and a half inch drives because there's one more mount hiding down here in the bottom or three two and a half inch drives and five three and a half inch drives in these trays they have permanently attached the little rubber grommets to them for noise and vibration isolation and there's actually one other thing I didn't really like about them and that's the fact that when you slide them in there's no real rails for them to sit on the entire time like they're just free until you slide them all the way in and then they hook onto the other side so there's two thumb screws at the back of each one you loosen that and then once you pull it out these are great again these thumb screws don't come out on their own so they'll actually stay in there so once you pull it out it just swings freely until you pop it into the little spot on the other side of that that stealth cover over there so I love to see a return to quality with metal drive cages instead of plastic ones but I wouldn't have minded seeing a little bit more of a solid support for it now I understand why they did these two things so less support as well as fewer drive cages does give you more ventilation so that front those front fans at least if they're going to be choked by the front panel they might as well not be choked by the the hard drive cages behind them so I can see their point in doing this it's just not necessarily something that I 100% agree with inside this little NZXT box of accessories we find all of the screws that we will need as well as a little NZXT sticker nothing truly exceptional in there oh yeah nice big CPU cutout so you're going to be able to access your CPU socket pretty much no matter what and then I did have one other complaint about the case although this is a fairly minor thing so I've got an AX1200i in here and the modular interface is pretty hard to get at because you can't actually it seems remove oh no wait no yeah it's riveted in so you can't actually remove that stealth cover on the front of the case it's a little bit hard to get at your modular interface in here especially once you have a bunch of cables plugged in but this is a minor complaint because it's the kind of thing that you really won't have to deal with all that often so all the I.O. and all the cables are attached to the top of the case here there you go very very simple very very clean so the way that you that you sort of get at the top is to just pop this off and then there's no wires attached to anything like that it's extremely hefty extremely solid feeling and then the only ventilation is here along this side and here along the back and it's got more of that neoprene feeling foam on it you can also see now the H100i that I have installed there you go so we've got two 120 millimeter fans and you can actually slide them around depending on exactly where you want to position them and then you can put a third one here although it should be noted that if you do install a third fan and radiator here you won't be able to mount the radiator this way around so you can see I have the tubing coming down on this side because that'll interfere with the top hard drive cage that'll limit you instead to four hard drives four three and a half inch drives instead of five three and a half inch drives although if I was using this case I'd probably be going for like an ultimate liquid cooling quiet machine or something like that so I'd get some nice high static pressure fans like nff12s I'd get two triple radiators I'd run them extremely low rpm and then I'd be able to basically overclock the snot out of the system inside in spite of the fact that it's extremely silent you would be limiting your expansion options in terms of storage though because you'd pretty much be stuck with these two SSD mounts and then the SSD mount in the bottom the good news about that though is that there's nothing limiting the height of these drives and Western Digital has I believe a two terabyte two and a half inch drive that's a non-standard thickness it's 15 millimeters or 17 millimeters thick so that gives you some great options in terms of both SSD and mechanical drive expansion even if you're stuck with a two and a half inch form factor I think that pretty much wraps it up guys thank you for checking out my unboxing and I guess it's a review of the H440 from NZXT don't forget to like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment on the Linus Tech Tips forum where we're more likely to see it and you can engage in perhaps more civilized discussion as compared to 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