Gadgetory

gigabytes X $2.99 motherboard lineup features a range of options with support for Intel's Core x-series CPUs boards like the Auris X 299 gaming 7 are packed with useful features and support obtain memory Thunderbolt 3 and USB 3.1 gen2 click the link in the description for more information so like week or two ago a bunch of people did videos on NZXT s no case the H 700 I full tower intelligent case that the NZXT has integrated some fancy new technology into to help you connect up fans connect up RGB and also some intelligence to control those features now what I'm gonna do today theoretically might be your first look at the smaller version of the H 700 I this is the H 400 I it's a micro ATX case also available in a variety of colors I have the black and red version today so my focus for today's video is going to be on this case but to properly properly demonstrate any case it's best to build a system in it so I'm actually gonna be doing an all AMD system today which is my first all AMD system in like a really long time I don't know how long it's been but this is to celebrate the the AMD Radeon Vega GPUs coming down in price to reside almost at their MSRP this is the Radeon Vega 56 and you can actually get it for four hundred to four hundred twenty eight dollars at least as of the filming of this video to go along with that of course I've got a rise in CPU which is tucked right down there I'm actually using the r7 1700 which is the eight core although if you are planning on building a system similar to this I would say the r5 1600 would also be an excellent choice or the 1600 X if you can get it for about the same price a six core would be a good solution here we're gonna have eight cores though to keep our CPU cool we have the NZXT Kraken X 62 which will fit in this case even though it is a very large radiator 280 millimeter using two 140 millimeter fans for memory I have a Corsair Vengeance led kit I'm gonna try the white version of that kit although we do have some RGB LEDs in here too and we'll see how it looks and I might swap it out the color scheme in case you didn't already realize was black red whites the whites primarily is going to be provided by the accent coloring on our motherboard here the asrock may be 350 mm pro 4 and if you're looking for a micro ATX amp or motherboard that supports rise in CPUs that looks pretty nice and that has the features that you'd wants on a motherboard like four dimm slots as well as MDOT to support this board has it and it's only about 75 bucks the be 350 chipset also means that it does allow overclocking of the rise in CPU and it does have some cooling on the power delivery for the CPU as well so hopefully we can get a bit of an overclock out of that too we of course need to power the system so we have the Corsair V 650 power supply which is going to get the job done it's 80 plus gold rated and it has all black cabling and finally for storage we have a new budget oriented SSD from OCZ Toshiba this is the TR 200 480 gig version of it here this is available in 480 and 240 gig capacities and we just wanted an SSD and I didn't want one that was too expensive so there you go let's go ahead and get this build underway so I got the H 400 I out of the box and let's stick first look at it of course smaller sibling to the H 700 i if you watched any of the coverage on that and there's been excellent coverage by the likes of hardware connects and gamers Nexus so first off you're probably going to notice this sort of redesigned cable management bracket right here that they put in it's all red and it's it's got sort of an angular bit and this is meant to allow you to conveniently write your cables along that in order to access things such as your power for your motherboard or your graphics card coming out right there so we'll see how that works out pre-installed we have a couple hundred and twenty millimeter fans here at the front as well as a single hundred and twenty millimeter exhaust fan there at the back top has an exhaust area here with a removable sorry my wobbly lazy susan is wobbly removable magnetically outlined dust filter so that is nice to have and up there we have support for 240 as well as 280 mm meter radiators up here for front i/o we have mic and headphone jack a couple USB 3.0 and a power button if I was to ask for anything on modern cases it's going to be the addition of a USB type-c preferably a USB 3.1 gen2 compatible type-c connector but you do have the basics covered up there for what it's worth beyond that we have a basement down in the bottom well we have a 2.5 inch mount right there that I'm probably actually not going to use simply because our ocz Drive does not match our color scheme at all I have no fear if that's the case for you you got a couple more 2.5 inch drive mounts there on the back you have this cable management area here as well that I really like because there's a couple different channels going up either side as well as velcro straps going across them and of course easy access to feed them through here with some protection from visibility from the front by that cable management get that goes down there and here you also find power which is going to provide power for this central hub right here which is part of their entire mo for this series is providing it a little bit easier way to connect up fans LEDs and control them also power their USB connection to get to your motherboard for control via the cam software LED out and then a one two and three fan connection points there as well you've also got dust filter down here on the bottom for the power supply so that's nice access from the back snaps into place and then for general airflow in the front most air flow is going to come in the side here via these small circle holes that are kind of perforated in the side here this is also of course one of the colored accent pieces that is on either side you are black blocked from the direct front but that will block some of the noise of course coming from your intake fans and then down here they've also continued that sort of circular hole scheme that this one has sort of a gradient effect since it goes from smaller holes to larger holes from the front to the back it's kind of a cool thing cool looking I like it in our accessory kits we have a set of screws of course some zip ties it's very handy to have along especially if you don't have those on hands from prior builds looks like you get a couple extra standoffs in there they did put the stand-ups in there for mini ITX as well as not full micro ATX but in any way I gotta add a couple RGB strip though they have actually included two this one comes with it is magnetic there we go give you a little extension as well for it and there is a second RGB strip that is pre-installed although it might be hard to see but it's right up there along the top edge so that one's in there for you and then the second one they've included and they say just put that one wherever it works best for your build front panel up here is made of metal so that is nice and still removes in the classic way that front panels usually remove with some prongs in there that latch into the case itself there's also hidden beneath here a pretty wide dust filter and that is so you can set up various configurations up here with the 240 or 280 millimeter radiators we're of course gonna be installing the kraken so we'll show you how much space you got there but there's a lot of space for radiators and I imagine push-pull configurations depending on the thickness of your radiator and all that's but for now now we're gonna get these fans out of here it was really nice and convenient of NZXT to pre wire all of these cables coming down here however if you're removing all these then it becomes less convenient but that's not to say they shouldn't have done it they did a good job there but bear in mind it's all wired in there pretty tight so you're gonna need to go in there and fish out some of your fan headers to unplug speaking of splitters these connections all have splitters on the end so the fan 1 fan 2 and fan 3 from the little unit up there all has three plugs on each end which means you can just out-of-the-box connect up up to nine fans to that device as to make sure this build was as NZXT as possible they did send over some extra fans and the fans are RGB and we know how much people love our G B so the top 140 fans and the rear 120 fan we're gonna replace NZXT air RGB 140 s and the kit that we have here also comes with the Q controller a hue + controller so we'll use that to connect these up it's a little Q plus it's a nice little device controls LEDs especially made by NZXT individually addressable LEDs which allows you to do some pretty cool effects with it discovered a shortcoming here with this case and compatibility which is that our 2.5 inch drive mounts the one in the back here this is a very thick unit by the way so this isn't going to be a problem with pretty much any SSD on the market but won't fit back here there's simply not enough space there for the side panel to go on so bear that in mind if you're we're thinking of installing it there also we have our bling amount spot here for an SSD and it's a little bit too wide to fit there either unfortunately which we're gonna been a cool spot for it because it does have a little LED light on it that lights up but that would definitely conflict with the tempered glass side panel windows so we are left with only one place to put this which is on the bottom of the case not physically on the bottom but mounted to the bottom of the case at the very bottom in the power supply section there's a dual mount here so you got these wider mounts for mounting a 3.5 inch drive or these smaller mounts for doing a 2.5 inch drive so we're gonna pop it in right there so guys at this point I thought we might be a little bit further along but the fact is that when you're attempting to connect up a bunch of RGB all at once and you want it to be addressable and that kind of thing there are some potential complications our main issue that we encountered was that our motherboard here has two of the requisite USB 2.0 headers on the motherboard itself that you need to connect up the devices that NZXT has produced in order to control RGB as well as fans so of course you got the smart device that's integrated with H 400 i right here and that means a USB 2.0 connection you also have our NZXT hue plus which also needs a USB 2 connection and then we also have the the RGB control as well as connection for the the NZXT control panel so you can monitor temps and speeds and everything and that also unique needs a USB 2.0 connection which the cable for that is lying around here somewhere anyway I was attempting to see if I could daisy chain more the fans together in order to get away with only having two of these connected but that's not really the best idea NZXT isn't for me that's when you're talking about connecting up these different RGB devices that they have created you can daisy chain up to four LED strips together or up to four of the fans they're fans together but you don't want to do both at the same time so you want to have fans going on the same daisy chain or a couple of LED strips also in order to accommodate our need for additional USB 2 headers we have the NZXT internal USB hub which they had included in the box and which I had completely neglected to remember was even NIC this allows you to take a simple USB 2.0 header on your motherboard and split it out into one to three more plus a couple actual internal USB ports USB 2.0 ports themselves so we're going to install this that will allow us to connect up all the devices that we need in order to control all the LEDs there's a nice little feature only just realized this was a thing but removable front tray for your radiator for your all-in-one or otherwise cooler which is convenient because if you need to do something like pass those tubes through there something like that it makes that a bit easier to do I had a moment of confusion here because looking at the front panel connections from this case you've got of course your USB 2.0 which is mainly coming from that smart hub there and USB 2.0 is a 10 pin block it's got one pin that's blanked out so you don't accidentally for instance plug it into an HD audio port which is the same sized block but has a different blanked out pin so you can't get these confused I suddenly saw what I thought was another USB 2.0 header coming from the fronts and got confused and then realized now this is front panel front panel connectors in a little block the same size as a USB 2.0 pin out header which is actually pretty convenient provided your motherboard has this same exact configuration which our asrock motherboard does as far as I can tell so that's cool just keep an eye out and remember they you and I'll have potentially three different little ten pin blocks to distinguish between in your case or in my case whatever the case may be there's a ribbon shot for you well everyone we have now theoretically finished this build although I will say that I have a lot of cables wedged down in there in the basement area down here for the power supply and I did it fairly unceremoniously so hopefully nothing will go wrong when I hit the power button right now of course I need to hit the power switch first and then hit the power button oh hey all right we're seeing initial success all the fans are spinning though and in my professional opinion I'd much rather have spinning fans than fancy LEDs so what I ended up having to do is swap out the memory yeah the Corsair Vengeance led kit that I initially installed in there just would not boot in any way shape or form even after I did get the system up and running and went to did a BIOS update to the latest one and went back and attempted to put it back in there there's no dice on that one it's not on the compatibility list for this asrock motherboard so I guess that's not too unexpected but I would have liked at least like to have seen like a BIOS screen or something with that anyway though I did swap in the corsair dominator Platinum kit that I have which is a 2 by 16 gig kit so there's 32 gigs of memory in here now that's the ddr4 3000 speed kit that worked just fine fortunately and also matches the color scheme with a silver top since white LEDs and as you can maybe also not tell I've got the LEDs up and running with the cam software one thing I want to point out when I first got the system booted up and everything after I had gotten Windows installed I had actually unplugged all the USBs because I was having issues getting things booted up and started even after I reconnected the USBs the lights on the air fans still were not lighting up but I actually had to install the cam software within Windows and then they lit up and were able to sync and it did a firmware update on the hue plus and now you have the beautiful candy cane light show that I have got set up right now which is just using the Marquis effect which will change the lights going along all the individually addressable LEDs on each of the round air fans as well as the LED strip that's up here at the front cam software allows you to individually change the lighting configuration for the stuff that's connected to the NZXT smart device which has connection for one of those addressable LEDs the hue plus as well as the NZXT Krakens so pretty cool they can configure all those and then it does have a sync all function as well that didn't work for me at first attempt but I kind of ran out of time there and I had to finish off this video so I am pretty happy with this build ultimately even though I did have some issues getting it up and running once it was all put together the cable management is definitely challenging though if you're trying to connect up all the stuff that I have connected up in here now and the XC stated goal with this case was to take the modern PC building challenges of integrating a bunch of fans liquid cooling as well as RGB and when you're taking a bunch of different RGB devices they're all individually addressable RGB LEDs you have to have the cables all going the same direction and everything like that so it is definitely challenging it definitely adds a huge amount of extra work to the builds if you're not doing that type of thing so bear that in mind but you can get it in the end result that looks like this and for what it's worth I think NZ NZXT has taken a pretty challenging situation with all the cables in different ways you have to go and made it a lot easier by providing labels of each end for which way they're supposed to go and very well-written documentation so you can take a look at that to sort of figure out how you're actually supposed to connect everything up and yeah just a little bit of trial and error and you can probably get it going just like I did here ultimately though I really like the H 400 I I'm a big fan I'm kind of a sucker for microc ATX cases anyway you have an extremely powerful system right here and you even have a decent amount of expandability with an accessible m dot 2 slot they're a full length PCIe although I believe it's a buy for connection down there at the bottoms so you could add a TV tuner card or maybe a video capture card or maybe a 10 gigabit ethernet card down the road so great job NZXT on the H 400 I will say that I have not investigated the I part of this case the intelligence automatic sound and fan adjustment features that are integrated there so let me know in the comments if you'd like me to take a look at that or further address the performance of the system since this wasn't necessarily one of my monthly builds I wasn't planning to go and test it but I might if there is enough interest so leave those comments in the comment section and of course thumbs up button on your way out and subscribe to my channel for more videos just like this one thanks for watching guys and we'll see you next time