My rebuild

Highwayman

Extraordinary Member
Joined
Jun 3, 2009
Location
Great Britain
Well rebuilt my rig today with a new Midi-Tower that's been out for about a year ago, but caught my eye a few weeks ago with it's Darth Vader styling.

The NXZT Hades

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Comes with quite a lot of features;
complete in & out black paint job and matching black screws & assessories, 2x 200mm intake fans with red led & dust filters (one front, one side panel), 2x 140mm roof exhaust fans, 1x 120mm rear exhaust, floor mounted PSU area raised supports and air grill and dust filter, twin SSD rack, 9x 5 1/4 bays with optional tooless install clips, 3x HD caddies with noise reducing grommets, cabel tidy system with a good inch of room behind mobo and very good access to CPU cooler base and precut water cooling areas, 3 independant temperature probes which you place manually and has digital display of the temps on the front door of case. :eek:

As for the space inside, well it's pretty cramped as far as jumbo coolers go, I still managed surprisingly to fit my Zalman 9700LED which is about 150mm tall, despite disclaimers on NZXT's site about only having really enough room for 124mm CPU coolers. In addition this case hold 300mm long GPUs so my 5870 PCS+ fits just fine although with its special cooler being as tall as 150mm same as my Zalman one it only just fits... guess it was designed more for the stock ati cooler editions, as my pic below shows, quite literally 1mm clearance between the GPU heatpipes and the side panel fan... that said if you can't quite pack it all in, the side panel can be mounted externally easy enough and as twin dust filters so no biggie. :bigtongue:

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For an idea of the Zalman 9700led, here's a bare system pic I found that give you an idea.

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So the final result... well it's already beaten my old rig that had a 250mm side panel fan by getting the idle temps down to 26C on my Q6600, as for noise level, well the case fans are rated around 15-20db so not too bad at all.
 
Temperature scores from Coretemp running Prime 95 x64 at 100% for an hour. at 65C that's about as high as i'm willing to go... don't want to be straining the nearly 4 year old CPU too much, has to last untill i saved up for a nice Sandybridge in the summer.

FSB overclocked from 266 to 333 (Wolfdale rated mobo rated to 333 default and 400 max, though my Q6600 defaults to it down to 266fsb), forcing CPU to 3ghz per core and my DDR3 ram from 1066 mhz to 1333mhz (which is still well underclocked as rated to 1600mhz).

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To complete the blog I really needed a top down shot so emphasize how the cooler fits "just". As you can see this looking down through the top of the case (currently empty middle slot for 2nd top 140mm extractor fan) shows the grey/black plastic edge of the side panel 200mm fan takes a good amount of the available 180mm inside.

The side fan is clearly just making contact to the side fins on my Zalman 9700, thankfully the rounded edge and bendy fins means its a no brainer to fit, even had it not it could have been rotated on the mounting, which may not be said of the currently fashionable square block coolers of size.

If you do get this case make sure you can rotate the cooler to avoid the hangover of the size panel fan or get a rounded cooler like mine, or avoid this case (which would be a shame cos its very good), or get a water cooling block which can have the radiator unit attached to either of the two 140mm roof fan bays which it supports apparently.
 
Nice case but looks more like stealth technology than the Darth Vader look. You got me intrested in it, does it come in any other colors than the red leds.
 
sadly no, but nothing stopping you changing the leds, well as for the Vader styling, red n black for sithlords and vaders mouthplate looks kinda like it.
 
Well since the last blog I've swapped out the Motherboard and CPU and upgraded them to an nice Asus P55 board with a Intel 870 i7 cpu.... very nice
 
That's a nice setup. Have you concidered a Corsair H70 to cool that bad boy? I installed one and brought my temps down 20c
 
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