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A Closer Look (Interior):
The interior of the case is nicely laid out and well engineered, save for one minor gripe and one major gripe, which I'll get to in a minute. The case comes with 9 hard drive trays that have vibration dampeners and are compatible with both standard 3.5" hard drives and 2.5" laptop hard drives. It also comes with a vibration dampener for the PSU.
The 9 hard drive slots are enough for almost everyone, save the few people making ridiculous raid systems (present company included). This is one of the reasons that TechwareLabs asked me to review this case. For my home setup I run 4 x 750GB Seagate drives in a raid-5 array for a container amount a little over 2 TB as my storage device. For my main OS partition I use 2 x Western Digital 74GB Raptors in a raid-0 array to maximize speed. That makes a total of 6 drives, which makes finding an appropriate case difficult. Mid towers are almost always out of the question due to size constraints, which leaves full towers. Luckily for me, I've always had an affinity for full towers. Not only does the Whisper accommodate my hard drive needs, but it does so with room to spare, all the while helping to silence my noisy raptors.
NOTE: NZXT makes the Whisper case available with an optional 500W PSU which we would not recommend for use with our test setup as 500W is barely enough power for the number of drives we cram into the Whisper let alone the remainder of the system and video card. We would suggest the use of a higher rated PSU for a fully outfit system with several drives.
The front 5.25" drive mounts are tool-less which makes drive removal easy.
Now for the bad parts. The compartmenting of the case was a good idea in concept, separating the hard drives and PSU into the area with the most fans and separated by a metal divider, only it raises a few problems. By having the PSU mounted on the bottom, it causes problems with cable routing and cable length being able to reach drive bays at the top of the case. I had to move my DVD drives down a few slots to make it work. My PSU has fairly long cables and this was still a problem for me. I believe others will have this issue as well. There is also no room behind the non-removable motherboard tray to wire your system. Everything has to be pushed through a hole between the top and bottom half of the case. It would have been nice, had NZXT included some power extenders to make it easier to reach the higher bays.
My major complaint was with how they designed the top half's fan setup which doesn't provide adequate cross circulation for higher end setups, but NZXT managed to save themselves ex post facto (after the fact, for the latin challenged). The way the top of the case is engineered, there is only one fan. Newer graphics cards generate a large amount of heat, and it seems as though NZXT forgot this during the design phase. The single outtake fan is located above where the graphics card would be, which doesn't lend any substantial circulation across the cards. So if you have a CrossfireX setup with two card that output back into the case, such as the Palit Radeon 4870 Sonic Dual Edition, then you're looking at a nasty localized spot of hot air. Like I said at the beginning though, they did manage to save themselves. As I was writing this review, I received an email saying that NZXT was offering a free front fan assembly for Whisper owners. All you have to do is email NZXT at RMA@nzxt.com and request the part. This should allow for sufficient cross circulation, which is really required for high performance setups.
REALTIME PRICING ON THE NZXT WHISPER