Noise and Thermal Testing - NZXT H230 Silent Case Review

Plugging in and powering on the NZXT H230, there were basically two ways things were going to go: it was going to have adequate airflow and middling acoustic performance, or it was going to have poor airflow and good idle acoustic performance. Given the modest hopes NZXT has for the H230, though, just about anything beyond our stock configuration is probably going to be a bit beyond what this case was intended for.

Unfortunately, even the modest task of cooling a stock Intel Core i7-2700K and an upper midrange video card with an open air cooler instead of a blower is a bit beyond the H230. The GTX 560 Ti we use is rated with a TDP of 170 watts, which is high but not astronomical.

Every other silent case meets or beats the H230 thermally, and this is essentially "easy mode" right now. The cases included are mostly budget; this isn't a murderer's row of hardware but reasonable competition, and it's already not looking good.

Poor thermals mean loud internal fans, and that's exactly what we run into. The H230 just doesn't have much in the way of cooling capacity, and as a result it's louder than most of the other cases under load.

Overclocking the testbed only made matters for the H230 worse.

Overclocked thermals are pretty dire on almost every front but the SSD, which gets a healthy amount of totally unneeded cooling. The GTX 560 Ti and i7-2700K were both hitting temperatures well into the 90s, with the cores of the 2700K hitting as high as 98C in a 24C ambient room.

Noise levels go to hell right along with the thermal performance. The NZXT H230 was already having trouble keeping its components cool at stock speeds, bumping up stress just makes things worse.

To satisfy morbid curiosity, here are the test results from the full fat testbed, which goes well beyond the ~320W our overclocked testbed generates.

At least the storage is running cool?

The H230 does some work containing the noise as its internals roast, but it should be abundantly clear at this point that this is not a case suited to even upper high end hardware. Those of you planning on using this for your AMD FX-9590 build will have to look elsewhere.

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