Gadgetory

hey everyone this is Steve from gamers Nexus Donette and today we're looking at NZXT is new h 630 silent series enclosure which is priced at around $150 MSRP and is still brand new the Aged 630 use is the same chassis that's the underlying frame as the phantom 630 but has new paneling that aims to decrease noise emissions and mitigate operating volume without cutting too deeply into performance in theory as always let's cover hard specs and then jump into my opinions and the the issues i've encountered and finally we'll talk a bit about benchmark performance against other similarly priced cases so respects first the H 630 is a damn big case it measures in at around nine point six inches wide by 21.5 tall by twenty two point three deep and it's really heavy I don't have the exact number in front of me but it's easily thirty pounds so very heavy case each of the individual panels excuse me it's also very heavy because not only is there a porous foam material in there too in theory absorb sound but the steel is also extra thick because they're trying to block any sound from escaping through through the actual metal other than that the case is outfitted with a single 200 millimeter intake fan and a single 140 millimeter exhaust fan and there isn't a fan controller on the H 630 contrary to the previous two NZXT towers I reviewed the 820 and the phantom 820 and phantom 630 but there is a fan hub on the rear side of the board similar to the switch 810 so so that is there if you do have a ton of fans and would rather manage through that pathway then use the motherboard connections the system has room for up to two 240 millimeter 280 milliliter or massive three sixty millimeter radiators in the front and or top positions and 360 you'll mostly find for open loops if you're not familiar with that one alternatively it can be outfitted with an additional front 200 millimeter fan and up to two top 200 mm fans and to bottom 140 millimeter fans with variations of 140 and 120 in between all of those the drive cages are completely modular and can be removed of unused theoretically freeing up your intake channels and if you do want to remove all those drive cages there are also two rear side SSD sleds so that's identical again to what's found on the Phantom 630 cable management space is abundant with 27 millimeters or actually in my opinion though I think it is 27 millimeters it's somewhere around there it's between 27 and 36 millimeters of room on the rear side of the case for cable routing so that's very easy to fit a 24-pin power connectors with stacked PCIe connectors for instance very easy to do the H 630 like the P 630 has got the same cutouts riddling the entire chassis making for plenty of pathways to more easily conceal your cables and it's got rubber grommets on almost all of them you can basically there are cutouts available for ATX boards for micro ATX boards and and then you can basically route all of your I ok Buhl's and power cables through whatever channel you want to so all that's very cool for a cable management enthusiasts other than that stuff what makes the 630 unique right because the phantom 630 has all of these things for the most part so what makes the h 630 unique well first of all it's got a foam lined top and in front and side panels which I spoke about briefly and that's just that's really just the start of it you won't find any large meshes or extra fan ports in the side panels in this case and no large meshes in the top or front panels either for that matter just a very narrow intake slit for each of those and exhausts obviously for the top you can't really intake any air through there the Aged 630 uses very thick steel as I've mentioned and that's lined with porous sound damping film which theoretically mitigates sound emissions from your internals and other than that all the cracks the the panelling where the panels are either bent or you know angled is all cocked so no sound can escape from that either let's talk about this foam I talked about pretty extensively about sound damping and soundproofing techniques in the full review that's linked below but I'll go over it briefly here as well and performance computing there are a few different philosophies to soundproofing cases you have redirection and reflection sound blocking and sound absorbing that sort of the main approaches and these are all mixed together in improper case designs as well so nd XT uses sound absorption methods Silverstone tends to favor sound redirection and fractal design tends to favor sound blocking obviously again like I said all these are mixed together but those are what they favor let's talk about each of those briefly we first talked about sound redirection methods and Silverstone's rv0 for that was demoed to us at CES shown here where they've angled the enclosure paneling and intake grills to be pointed backward and away from the user this helps direct sound away from the user without removing the grills and intakes entirely so there's still intake or exhaust or whatever you need and the fans can still breathe but the noise that's coming out of those fans is being bounced the the sound waves are physically being bounced backwards away from the user you can still hear it it's just not as bad it's not directly towards your ears and that is quite noticeable on the other front we have fractal who as I said they tend to block noise rather than absorb its echo they still use reflection techniques to whittle down the sound energy so for instance the defined excel case has a top mounted fan that's angled slightly toward the rear of the case if you've noticed and this helps reflect return the the returning sound waves toward the rear and away again from the user and then we have NZXT who's focusing on sound absorption by using film and Silverstone and fractal also use foam and zxe is just really emphasizing it much more and there are two primary types of sound damping film there is porous and resin I won't go too into detail on resin in here I do that in the article but porous sound damping foam is what NZXT uses and it has a microscopic ish cell structure of pores so when a sound wave hits the foam on the panel part of the sound energy from that wave is converted into heat which is generated by the friction between the wave and the cell structure and then that part that's converted into heat is taking energy away from the actual sound wave so it's decreasing the noise emission and the remaining portion of the sound energy is reflected this is pretty basic stuff it's not specific to computers it's reflected and then the process repeats as the wave is diminished bouncing between surfaces until it eventually leaves the case and the goal here is to force the sound wave to travel as far as possible prior to exiting the case and along the way it's diminishing its energy in two primary methods one is simply by the actual bouncing process and two is from the friction that's generating heat energy out of sound energy so again I describe all this if it's interesting to you in the article but I do keep a pretty top-level speaking specifically to NZXT soundproofing I was underwhelmed it's not particularly quiet it's nothing like I mean the define art for is kind of a cheaper case so you can't hold it to the same degree as the Aged 630 or define exile but it's nothing like the define Excel in terms of actual innovation and it's not really like Nanaki a product either not that they're available in the US but still good comparison other than the soundproof he's not being really that exciting the performance is not exciting at all either on the aged 630 there's no doubt that the aged 630 is quieter than the phantom 630 on high settings but by sticking high rpm performance fans on the aged 630 without including some sort of fan controller we end up with a system that's ultimately louder than a voltage regulated fan array where you can decrease voltages to lower the RPMs and thus lower the noise emission with cooling with quiet cases you make a sacrifice right you have to sacrifice something somewhere and in the case of quiet cooling that's going to be performance you don't have to sacrifice all of your performance to get some level of silence and you don't have to sacrifice all your silence to get some level of performance normally the way this is done is by using fan controllers in conjunction with all these wave deflection and absorption techniques so that you can keep fans at lower speeds when it's not important to have performance and you put them at higher speeds when it's important to have performance like when you're gaming and you have a headset on so you don't care as much about the noise so just some stuff to think about there as far as NZXT again not very impressive but let's move on to cooling performance first of all I had very strange results from testing the age 630 with additional fans in the additional fan ports I try to test cases with some of the option fans populated optional fans populated so I can tell you guys what the optimal configuration is but I saw almost no note where the improvement with age 630 and that's talked about in great depth in the review below because it was very strange so click on that for that information however I can show you the case for his case benchmarks so here we're looking at the CPU bench for the Aged 630 against all of our other cases we recently of course reviewed the silverstone our bo2 that's up at the top phantom 6:30 and 8:20 are both in there as well and these 638 630 rather is slightly below the pea 630 which makes sense in the H 630 our overclocked 35 70 K performed at sixteen point seven C when idle and 57 C under load and that's decidedly unimpressive but not really scary either especially compared against the our vo2 which I just benched it's it's not all that all that impressive there's really no other way to say even similarly unimpressive is the GP performance where the aged 630 Falls to the very bottom of the chart at fifty three point one C even the 7c Idol is quite good actually the the load temperature is just not all that great it's not like it's gonna kill your GPU or anything it's not that extreme it's just not what you buy you know you don't drop $150 and expect that it's it's tough to recommend this case as a whole there's always a trade-off between noise and performance but the H 630 fails to succeed in either aspect of its design it's not bad it's just not it's not you know making anyway it's not it's just not blowing a hole in the industry and that makes it tough to recommend it's absolutely not a bad case don't let me give you that impression it's not the silent enclosure we were hoping for its performance leaves a ton to be desired but other than that it has good build quality it has good ease of installation features that has good paneling has it's not prohibitively loud or warm it's just not awesome in terms of silence or being cool and that said it's tough to make alternative recommendations as well because this price point is sort of unique NZXT is on to something and there just aren't a lot of good quiet cases at the 150-dollar and up price point other you start hitting some of the Leon Lee stuff but that's a completely different ballgame on the low end you've got the define r4 that's around a hundred bucks that's geared more toward mid-range systems and won't be as effective for high-end machines the same is true for BitFenix is ghost if you're building a mid-range system look into those then you've got an anoxia stuff if it ever comes to the US and that's sort of the 130 dollar range though no way of telling what MSRP will really be and as far as 150 and up I don't know a whole lot of cases off the top of my head I'm sure some of you do please post those in the comments below for others all around it's just an awkward situation for a case the price point is good the features are good the enthusiasts class focus is good NZXT just has to figure out how to deliver more on either the silence or the performance fronts and and that's where I'm gonna leave this so if you're interested in the case don't let me stop you from buying it it's nothing catastrophic lis broken just not what we were hoping for and I will see you all next time peace