NZXT Panzerbox Mid Tower

Spare Tire · Post by **Spare Tire** » Wed Jul 08, 2009 7:52 pm

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/ha ... eview.html

The review says it has excellent airflow but it's quite noisy because it's so open. I wonder if being open like this would be a plus for a close to all passive setup.

qviri · Post by **qviri** » Wed Jul 08, 2009 8:46 pm

As I see it, openness of a case is on a funny continuum.

If you are going totally passive with no forced convection at all, then you want a case as open and as large as possible.

The moment you add a slow fan, you want an almost-closed case, except for very well defined intake and exhaust areas. As you add on fans and increase the speed, you will need more intake and exhaust, and the case will become more open again.

If you have just one fan, you might want to mount it on the CPU heatsink and duct it to the exhaust, or use it as case exhaust fan and have a tower CPU heatsink nearby or ducted. In an very open case like this one, this fan will draw air from everywhere and nowhere in particular. If you have just one intake area, you know the air will be coming from there, and you can use that for other purposes. Giving hard drives some cooling is a popular application.

I can see the case in which you'd have a very open case and then a very low speed fan or two just providing the little nudge a heatsink might need to keep temperatures reasonable. This case, with centrally located large high-speed fans, doesn't seem to be designed with that in mind. Certainly you could remove the fans, but at that point you're paying $130 for some aluminium and a lot of alu mesh.

Spare Tire · Post by **Spare Tire** » Thu Jul 09, 2009 5:55 am

Thanks for your imput. Indeed i was thinking of having just the top fan pulling up. Sounds like that wont work too well.
I liked this case because it was short for an ATX above all. Kinda dissapointed they couldn't have made it silent too.

bugmenot · Post by **bugmenot** » Thu Jul 09, 2009 8:51 am

input

Spare Tire · Post by **Spare Tire** » Thu Jul 09, 2009 9:07 am

N and M being close together, you can't discard the possibility of it being a typo. I get the benefice of doubt.

qviri · Post by **qviri** » Thu Jul 09, 2009 10:38 am

Spare Tire wrote:Thanks for your imput. Indeed i was thinking of having just the top fan pulling up. Sounds like that wont work too well.
I liked this case because it was short for an ATX above all. Kinda dissapointed they couldn't have made it silent too.

I always feel bad knocking down ideas. To clarify, I am confident you could make it work. Nothing's impossible, some things just take more effort than they might be worth. In this case, having the top fan ducted to a large heatsink (Mugen 2 with longer side oriented horizontally, perhaps) might work, if you have integrated graphics and non-demanding hard drives; most of them are these days, to be fair.

However, you don't really know much about the fan, whether it rattles, whines, and so on. It's not really a standard size, so you may be limited in changing it if necessary. From what I got from the review, you can swap two 120 mm fans in that spot, but at that point, you're back to square one, as there are plenty of proven 120 mm cases around. (They won't fry your computer if you spill water on them either

)

I agree that greater choice of shorter, or in general smaller, ATX/mATX cases would be handy. Personally I'd like to see a good-looking 10" by 10" by 5" half-cube which would take mATX powered by a pico-style PSU. A 10"-side cube might be interesting too. However, I really don't know if there are sufficient volumes to justify a design and production run for a fairly unique set of components (picoPSU) and users.