Gadgetory

fractal design cases have inspired modders all over the world who have built some amazing systems like this Darkseid themed case by George priscilla's showcasing the spacious internals in the define s or metallic acid a mini ITX system by Justin Olson featuring a white black and red color scheme and a super clean layout in they define Nano s there are a ton more awesome builds like these on fractal designs modding series page so check it out via the sponsor link in this video's description and get inspired for your next project how's it going guys and welcome back to Pauls hardware today's video is going to be my follow-up for my november monthly build which was an all AMD system built in the new NZXT th400 eyes so as i do every month i parted out the system earlier in the months built it and now i'm gonna be testing it will do some acoustic tests some thermal tests as well as some gaming tests since this is definitely a gaming system but first I wanted to address some of the feedback that I've gotten over the past say week or two after I posted this original video and I want to start by talking about where these sort of concepts and that where the builds begin and the build began with the H 400 I the case itself which NZXT had talked to me about doing a video on because the H 700 I had launched which they sent me as well and they were like hey you're probably one of the only people who's going to get a video up on this right as it's becoming available do you want to do a video on this first so I said yeah and then beyond that I was like right what am I going to put in the system and I decided I wanted to do an all AMD build for one I feel like AMD platform right now at least when it comes to Rison threaded / - but for the purposes of this system Rison is kind of the most viable bang for the buck as far as what you get when it comes to the cpu and the motherboard options and then the second thought was looking at the prices of the AMD radeon RX Vega graphics card the vega 56 and vega 64 a couple weeks ago they had actually come down in price to where you could get the vega 56 for around four hundred to four hundred twenty dollars of course week-and-a-half goes by and i build the system and the prices have gone back up to closer to five hundred dollars for a vega 56 so that is one of the reasons why this actual system is not necessarily a good value for the money there are definitely different ways you could spend the 1700 H dollars that was would be spent on buying and putting the system together as is that you could reinvest in other areas that we get you more performance out of your system versus making something that is well so pretty and color-coordinated and of course very intentionally all AMD a couple of the things that affected the cost leanest of the system was the memory itself because it's corsair dominator platinum memory and the Dominator Platinum's can come in at almost double the price of comparable ddr4 memory kits and that's only with me and the perks list using the 16 gig kit of this memory whereas what I actually have installed is the 32 gig kit also we have an NZXT krey-kin X 62 liquid CPU cooler which costs you 150 ish dollar range kind of weird to have a CPU cooler that costs more than several other key components of the build like the motherboard which only costs $75 for example and definitely a very valid complaint in that using the CPU cooler with this CPU and this motherboard maybe it's a little bit out of balance because chances are if you were gonna strop 150 bucks on your 6 on your CPU liquid cooler you're probably gonna spend roughly the same amount on your motherboard to make sure that you have good overclocking options whether it comes to the UEFI options or the power delivery options now when it comes to micro ATX and for motherboards there's actually a fairly limited set of options that are there and the reason I went with this asrock motherboard was partially due to the m2 configuration ahead partially due to the fact that just there aren't that many micro ATX motherboards that are available there are some out there asus has a tough series motherboard for example that i was heavily considering but in the end i went with the aesthetic consideration with this board and aesthetics are often not that important unless you want everything to look pretty and this was a build where I wanted everything to look pretty also in line with that is the fact that we've included NZXT air RGB fans three of those that are a decent amount to the cost of the build the NZXT hue Plus that I'm using to help control these and then of course the NZXT Creek and X 62 also has RGB control and as already mentioned that was a fairly expense of peace as well so all this is to say I'm not necessarily telling you guys at home or on a budget and looking to build a high-powered system hey guys this is exactly what you should do this was more of a use case scenario to show what the age 400 eye can look like when it's all kitted out what you can do with some of the aesthetic options such as adding air RGB fans if you are so inclined and of course to put together a viable working system in there at the same time so any of you guys who wants to take for instance the core components here Vega 56 and an AMD r7 1708 core CPU combine them up with a more viable set of actual say case power supply and whatever else you want going in there post that in the comments section and let me know what you can get with roughly the same level of performance but a lot less money if you're not as worried about it looking pretty anyway that's enough of an introduction and addressing as some of the feedback I got on this build let's now move on to some testing so the first thing I did with this build of course was get windows installed and went and updated the UEFI 2 version I believe around 3.1 now the latest version for this motherboard part of the thing I was trying to figure out there with the initial build in the first video was just getting the NZXT fans to light up I should bear in mind that you may need to install windows up the Windows operating system and load up the canvas software in order for those to light up but once I did all that stuff everything was working just fine so that's cool second step of course was to install the cam software and then beyond that get windows loaded and updated and all of that good stuff but with the cam software it's it's had its its share of quirks with us so far for instance when I first loaded it the and I and I loaded up my profile it actually had the window off screen I thought it was on a second monitor and I had some difficulty just getting that to come back over because it's not a resizable piece of software here whatever but I ended up solving that by plugging in a second monitor and I was able to access it and grab it and pull it back over I think that has something to do with my personal profile and whatever system I used this on before it had more than one monitor connected to it but cam can do quite a few different things it's got some basic monitoring here so you can see the CPU temperature and load and clock speed fan speed same thing for the GPU as far as temps fan speeds clock speeds memory usage is also there as well as the storage that you have connected up here then you can see some basic info about your computer on this screen here we can also verify that the RAM speed is set at its proper speed 29:33 is a divider and I was able to do that just by going in and plugging in the XMP setting from this memory it's running at casa latency I was listening to caste legacy 15 but here it's listed at 16 anyway that's close enough beyond that there's a gaming overlay you can able there's some over overclocking you can access and then of course there's fan speed control which is very nice when you have device is connected to the fan the fans for the crack in X 62 actually I plugged directly into the motherboard CPU fan header so I went into the motherboard fan configuration and I set that to silent mode and then I've done the same thing with the fan configuration here for the three air fans that are connected up to the NZXT smart device that's part of the H 400 I for this one I just made a custom profile so they're only running at about 30% fan speed when they're in low mode and that is working just fine for us here we can also see the fan speed of the Krakken X 62 as well for lighting this is your interface right here we're going to come back to that in just a second beyond that there's a couple more tabs this is for the smart device calibration which I don't believe we'll be touching on today gamers Nexus did a little test on that and found it to be still needs a little bit of work and then on this last tab you have some driver information so we can see we have drivers properly installed for our grid + u + and the crack in X 62 the great plus is what it will recognize that smart device as you plus you saw me install at the bottom and a crack in this is just the ACE tech USB driver and that will let you do stuff such as monitoring the liquid temperature so for your notifications over here I've disabled them for the time being but for instance CPU notification you can tell to notify you when it reaches a certain CPU temperature GPU temperature or down here at the bottom the actual temperature of the liquid in the crack and X 62 notifying you when it goes above sixty is a good idea because you don't run a iOS with really warm fluid so if you have a heavy overclock going something you definitely want to keep an eye on moving back to the lighting though there's actually individually you can see listed the Krakken the smart device which has a couple channel so you can actually do looks like up to four channels connected there and that is the LED that's going right across the top here in front of the fans and then of course you have the hue plus and that will tell you what fans you have connected up there and it's two channels you can do up to four smart LEDs and the connected directly at the same time and daisy chained together or up to five of the fans that's because the fans have eight LEDs on them whereas the strip's have ten LEDs so eight times five is forty or four times eight is less than that no ten ten times four is also 40 yes math now there's a sync mode here and which I was attempting to use briefly you can turn it on and it's supposed to sync all of them up together so you can see now when I turn that on all the lights on the air fans the LED strip going across the top and the Krakken X 62 all turn to be the same color and if you click on the actual color you're supposed to be able to adjust it right now it has covering marquee however here was I had an issue like it it doesn't it doesn't work there appears to be some issues with this specific preset although I was able to do that so some of the custom profiles that I saved it does appear like I am able to load up and get functional but if I want to go if I want to actually just go in here and like change this color or whatever like if I just wanted it to be blue alright nevermind it's working this was acting a little bit more funky for me when I first attempted it the other day but it does seem to be functional again this is what the sync all of them at the same time function so let's see if we can just do red green and blue there we go for getting a nice fade between red green and blue when it's doing it on all of those that makes it that's kind of Christmasy it's a little Christmasy tip the blue so here's here's where I think this might just be a UI issue so for example right now if I want to adjust this actual profile I can't I can't delete that and it was also giving me trouble selecting the various colors here so anyway let's go back and turn off the sync all and we can individually address these guys so all channels since there's two channels on the Krakken you can individually adjust the logo led by itself or you can individually adjust the ring LED going around the outside that's so we can do something like a spectrum wave and here now you should be able to see since I'm doing these individually I have changed the NZXT crack and X 62 LEDs to change but everything else is still going with my candy cane theme that I initially set up do you like that when you do when you choose a color it gives you the color code I believe that's a hex code down there at the bottom so you can easily grab that if you want to jump over to something else and do the same color so let's switch to our smart device Channel here I'll do this also fixed green and now we're moving a little bit more towards a Christmas theme I have the green in red and I've also we've still got the red and white from the candy canes this is this is just so seasonal and appropriate I don't know what to do now with the Marquis and the individual control over the lights you also have the ability to set up profiles here so you can make a profile there and change between its and you can also do some settings such as the interval of the LEDs if it's going around the loops a little bit too fast there you can change it to the slow mode there you can also change forward to backwards so if the LEDs are progressing in one direction you're like no want to go the other way you can switch it back the other way now what it's doing right now it's just a basic marquee and it's in white so it's not leaving the LEDs lit up on the air fans it's just doing that white going around each one and since I reversed it it's going from the three two one now instead of one two three and now we have the covering marquee which I have also set up in red and green and yeah this system very ideally suited if you want a Christmas theme or if you want red and white of course beyond that it's a red and black build so you're probably going to want to choose colors for the RGB lighting inside this is somewhat complementary to red and black so you're you're blocked out of some but there's a lot of cool options and hopefully as you've seen right now especially if it's Christmastime get yourself set up with some candy canes or some red and green mistletoe and holly super exciting anyway let's move on to some more actual testing so as I was getting prepped to do the sound test sounded temperature testing on the system I realized it was emitting a persistent little rattling noise at first I thought it was maybe the pump and maybe it was just working through getting some air bubbles out of there but actually it ended up being this top front 140 millimeter fan rattling not at all speeds but definitely it's enough speed said it was definitely a defective fan so fortunately NZXT was able to replace that so that's good and I actually this is the fan the offending fan itself I have pulled it out and unfortunately pulling out a fan like that with its three different connections and wiring in the back and pulling all that out not the simplest task but I got it out of there and got the new one end and thankfully it's now nice and quiet which you can probably mainly hear hero snoring right now but we're gonna do our noise test in just a second so yeah thankfully that has solved the problem of the Bradley fan problem number two has arisen though as you might be able to tell our lighting isn't exactly all on right now we do have a look high high reflection we do have the green but the fans aren't going to the correct colors right now the fans are what's connected up to the hue Plus which is down there in the bottom a quick aside to a larger problem like a really big problem my main capture system the godly PC with my hubris is being punished because it is on the fritz right now I hey ketta gets working on that but as a result I've got no means of doing actual screen capture right now so let me show you guys this though this is the cam software again and this is where we go to control lighting you might see the Kraken right up at the top being told to be all green okay and to the smart device the extra device part of the H 400 I they're also being told to be green but where'd my hue plus go was there before funny thing is we can go over here to see the driver devices and it's their hue plus the driver is installed so don't know what the deal is here but I can no longer control the lighting on the U+ and EXT did send me some troubleshooting tips here you can get other control panels and remove it as a USB device so I'll try that in a second if not I gotta like swap the cable and see if the cables an issue also possibly to try a different USB port but I already know that that can't be done there's no more available on the motherboard or connecting up to a different PC but since as mentioned eff and I've already got the problem of like my main capture system back there not working I really need to move on to that so I'm gonna leave this as mystery unsolved for now just a bug apparently will hopefully get worked out fixed with NZXT and let's move on to the San test so guys that just about wraps it up for this video of my testing of this little computer and the H 400 I again as mentioned in the beginning of the video I think you guys will find that this build is a little bit more geared towards aesthetics and there was more money spent on that so completely agree with any of you guys who are down there in the comments saying I could build a way faster system for the amount of money that went into this but all things considered for those of you who do want a system that is presentation worthy that you can have set up in your gaming room or out in your living room or in HTTP or something where people walk in and be like wow that looks really cool I think it's really nice what NZXT has done both with the design of the H 400 I and the considerations that they've made to help you light it all up in the blingy flash in with the addressable LEDs and the control via the NZXT hue plus as well as the smart device they included on the case as well as the NZXT creakin X 62 hey guys if you enjoyed this video then definitely hit the thumbs up button on your way out thank you so much for watching I'll be back with more tech videos very soon it is holiday season right now so I know there's lots of people who are interested and getting those holiday deals out so if you guys wanna help me this holiday season definitely click on my links to the products that I've used in this build that are all down in the video's description and thank you so much for watching again we'll see you next time