The NZXT H710i ($169.99) ATX PC case sits close to the top of NZXT’s product lineup, and for good reason: It’s big, it’s bold, and it hides a bunch of cool, premium stuff under the hood and behind its panels. It delivers notable improvements over the company’s well-received H510i case, and it’s worth looking at if you are a fan of the distinctive clean-design, futuristic-looking chassis ethos that NZXT is known for. (But you should also be looking for lots of space for big motherboards and serious cooling; it’s no compact box.) Given that this is a premium chassis, we’d like to see a few additions to the port loadout and some polish on a couple of items, but the H710i is solid for aesthetes, performance hounds, and serious tweakers looking to do liquid cooling with a multi-fan radiator, or heavy-duty air cooling.
The Case Design: Minimal to the Max
The NZXT H710i mirrors the style of many of the company’s other cases. Aesthetics being a matter of personal taste, it’s hard to objectively judge a case based off of its appearance. Some folks will think that the H710i comes off looking rather bland; others will appreciate the relative lack of bling. (For the latter, exactly that will be the appeal.)
We received NZXT’s all-black (inside and out) version of the case, which has a black cable-hiding and -routing bar running vertically inside. NZXT also offers a white-exterior version with a black interior and a white cable bar, and a black interior/exterior version with contrasting red parts (including the cable bar in red). Our test model is the most minimalist-looking of the lot: The front, top, and right panel of the H710i are all one solid color with few distinguishing marks. The NZXT logo on the front of the case and the sparsely populated I/O panel on the top of the chassis are the only defining characteristics here.
Owing to the lack of holes for ventilation on the front face, it goes without saying that the H710i doesn’t permit air intake as freely as some competing models. That’s not to say it’s blocked; NZXT placed a strip of perforated material on both the left and right sides of the case. This trim runs across the top and down the front of both side panels. Depending on your system design, this may permit plenty of inflow. As it lacks holes for ventilation on the front and top, however, it goes without question that some other cases, such as the Be Quiet Pure Base 500DX, allow for significantly freer inbound flow.
The left panel is full-on tempered glass. This shows off the case’s interior, which, depending on the color scheme of the H710i model you choose, may be a bit more striking. The red-and-black model and the white-with-black-strip model have some welcome contrast and character; our monotone tester is less visually interesting.
The front I/O panel (technically, on the top of the case) is surprisingly light, with few ports and the power button. You get a single 3.5mm audio jack here, along with two USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A ports and one USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C port. You’ll need an up-to-date motherboard with a Type-C header to use the latter port, so check for that or plan to shop for an adapter or a PCI Express card with the header. (To connect it straight to a motherboard without the header, you’d need an adapter turning a USB 3.0 19-pin header into a USB-C header, and that would limit the port to 5Gbps speeds instead of 10Gbps.)
The interior well of the system is a bit oversize, which means the case can take a standard ATX motherboard, or even an Extended-ATX (E-ATX) board. You might also notice the vertical PCI Express slots in front of the usual PCIe backplane. You can do a vertically mounted GPU in here, though like most such cases, the H710i doesn’t include the hardware or GPU riser cable to make it happen; you’ll have to source that yourself.
Inside the chassis, meanwhile, is a well-hidden premium feature: NZXT’s updated fan controller. The controller looks like a perforated square and works with the company’s CAM software for fan-curve tweaking and optimization. The case comes with three of the company’s 120mm Aer F120 case fans pre-installed up front and one 140mm Aer F140 on the rear panel. This set of gear likely pumps up the H710i’s $169.99 price, so be sure you mean to use the CAM controller and the fans before diving in. If you’ll just ditch or ignore them, you might want to look at the cheaper ($139.99) H710 instead.
The CAM software is better than your average bear for tweaking the fan and lighting internals of the chassis. Beyond the three fan channels, the hardware box also can control two RGB LED items attached to the controller, as well as up to four HUE 2 LED strips. Two strips come built into the case for addressable ambient lighting. (One is up top, one is behind the cable-hider bar, connected in series.) These also boost the price. Between the four fans, the CAM controller, and the strips, much of the cause for H710i’s price premium isn’t immediately evident from the outside.
The Building Experience
What the NZXT H710i lacks in obvious flash, it makes up for by providing a relatively easy building experience and some real intelligence. The glass panel on the left side is easy to remove by taking out one screw and giving the panel a light tug from the top. From here, you can angle in an ATX or E-ATX motherboard (or something smaller, though that will look odd) and a graphics card up to 16 inches long. Getting the motherboard into place is hampered slightly by NZXT’s signature cable-hiding bar, but this is a minor inconvenience at most. You can, and likely should, remove it before you start, but that will require some screw-twisting from the back panel and detaching the bar’s LED strip.
Getting into the right side of the case is even easier than opening the left. No screws hold the right-side panel in place; instead, a button on the back panel releases the panel when pressed. I do think it would have been better if NZXT had used this feature on the left side of the case, too, though I can see why, given that it’s glass, you want it to be more secure. Most builders will need to access the parts on the left side of the case, such as the motherboard, GPU, and RAM (and sometimes storage) far more often than the opposite side. Either way, though, it’s nice to be able to open either side of the case this easily.
In total, the H710i has room for up to seven 2.5-inch drives and two 3.5-inch drives, but not all at the same time. At the bottom of a case is a hard drive cage that can hold either two 3.5-inch drives or four 2.5-inch drives. Two more 2.5-inch drives can mount behind the motherboard tray.
The final 2.5-inch drive mounting location is on the side of the PSU compartment at the bottom of the case, but it’s a last resort. Routing cables to any drives here is tricky. It can be done by removing the cable bar, running cables through a hole set behind it, and then replacing the bar after. But it’s much easier to use any of the other mounting locations, if you can. That said, if you have a 2.5-inch SSD you want to show off (an RGB SSD, anyone?), this is the place for it.
At the top of the case is room for up to three 120mm case fans or a 360mm water-cooling radiator, but accessing these mounting spots will take some work. To get to them, you first need to remove the front panel by pressing plastic clips that are located all around the panel, then pulling upward. After that, you do the same thing to the top panel, but this is made more difficult by the presence of LED strips and the cable bar. It’s certainly doable, but from the get-go, based on my experience, if you plan to add extra case fans or a liquid-cooler radiator up top, be ready for a bit more work than usual. This is the price you pay for such a featureless (and free-of-fasteners) front and top panel.
Once you get under the top panel, though, installing a radiator isn’t hard. You get a bracket with four thumbscrews in place; remove it, and into it you can insert the radiator (again, up to 360mm, so a monster will fit) from the top. The radiator would go above the rails and its fans below, or you can flip it. The key thing, though, is that this design detail keeps the whole radiator-plus-fan sandwich isolated from blocking the edge of the motherboard. That is the real reward for getting the panels off.
Like in most modern cases, the power supply unit (PSU) gets mounted in the bottom of the chassis, but unlike in most, the PSU gets inserted through the back panel, not through the right side. You remove a bracket here that you then bolt onto the PSU’s rear panel. After that, you slide the PSU in through the back and bolt the bracket back in place.
This PSU-mounting solution may sound more complicated than simply inserting the PSU through the side of the case, but I actually find this system can work better in practice. It may require more screwing and unscrewing, but it’s easier than trying to align the PSU in place from the side while you fasten it into place with the other hand. It also helps you route your power cabling more efficiently as you slide in the box gradually from the rear panel.
To make cable management easier, NZXT also added some plastic channels and Velcro strips to the area behind the motherboard mounting tray. These help with guiding cables to their proper location and keeps them tucked away, neatly in place. That means less likelihood of the infamous “panel stuffing” session, trying to the get the right panel mounted by crushed-down, bulked-up cables running everywhere. Kudos to NZXT for this PC-builder creature comfort. Just getting the main 24-pin power cable under control is reward enough.
Verdict: A Nice Enough Case, But That Price…
All things considered, the H710i is a solid builder’s chassis, but whether it rates its lofty $169.99 price tag is another matter. The black model in particular is rather plain-looking, and the building experience I’d rate as essentially average, with a few perks such as the back-loading PSU and the cable channeling behind the motherboard tray. The front I/O panel is sparse for a case of its price. The H710i’s best feature is unquestionably the single side panel with the push-button opening action, but that’s relatively small potatoes in the premium-chassis zone that this case inhabits.
Just to name a few, the Thermaltake View 51 Snow ARGB Edition ($189.99) and the ADATA XPG Battlecruiser ($179.99) are both similarly priced, and have a different feature mix that may (or may not) fit you better. The Be Quiet Pure Base 500DX previously mentioned, though more utilitarian, offers a better building experience at a significantly lower price point of just $109.99.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with the H710i if you like the look. (And if you do, in the end that’s 80 percent of a PC case buy.) Just make sure you really need all of the extras that you are paying for: the CAM controller, the LED strips, the full complement of four fans, and the less-is-more look. Only then is it a good deal. Otherwise, shop for a sale.
