NZXT Tempest 210 Case Review - PAGE 3

A surprising amount of of open space lurks underneath the covering panels on the Tempest 210. With both side doors and the front panel removed, this case looks positively skeletal, and feels just as barebones in terms of weight as well. Coming in at barely over 6.6 kg (14.5 lbs) completely assembled, and probably closer to 4.5 kg (10 lbs) stripped, this is one of the lightest cases that I have worked with in a while.

Structural integrity has not been sacrificed either. Even laid wide open as it is in the picture above, I would not hesitate to use the Tempest 210 as a stepping-stool in a pinch.

The 210 is fairly standard in construction and design under the hood. Eight hard drives are supported in a rigid bracket system that dominates most of the front of the case, leaving enough room to fit an enthusiast class motherboard behind them. Things do get a little tight in the videocard area, but that is an issue inherent in the entire Tempest line-up. The motherboard tray has a decently-sized cutout for installing modern heatsinks that have as large of a piece of metal at the back as they do up in front. It seems that NZXT has skimped a little on the cable pass-throughs, but there were enough to get some some degree of cable management accomplished even if it was a pain at times trying to route cables through tight spaces. Instead of a drive-rail system to hold the hard drives in place, a screw-less system was incorporated here that uses two little metal pins that fit into the screw holes on the hard drive and secure it to the case with a twist lock system.

On paper this system sounds like it would work, but I encountered endless problems trying to fit those two metal prongs into the hard drive screw holes and it almost seemed as if they were too big to fit. Thankfully, these plastic retention brackets can be bypassed in favor of the standard installation screws. This "old-fashioned" solution is still useful because in my opinion the drives feel more secure installed this way. Additionally, the plastic brackets were only on the left side of the case while the other side of the hard drive was either left flopping around or required screws, which to me kind of negated the benefits of a screw-less tool-free system in the first place. I ended up just completely bypassing the plastic clips and simply secured all the hard drives with screws like in the good old days.

With the front bezel removed, the mounting holes for the front two 120 mm fans were visible. They only support 120 mm fans, but installation will be easy and should not get in the way of the hard drives at all.

The 120 mm and the 140 mm fans included in this case are rifle bearing fans manufactured by Xinchangfeng Electronics Co., Ltd. (also known as Martech) based in China, but are distributed by NZXT under their own brand. These are the exact same fans that were shipped with the Tempest EVO and are most likely found on all NZXT cases.

All the testing parts fit inside the Tempest 210 nicely. The videocard is just barely long enough to prevent the use of two complete hard drive slots, but this still leaves the potential to comfortably hold six drives. Space was a little tight when it come to plugging in the top +12V power line to the motherboard, so it to be easiest to plug that in before the motherboard itself was installed. Unfortunately, the space behind the motherboard for cable management is woefully lacking. With just 20 mm of clearance, there is not much room for organizing the spare cables and most of them ended up stuffed beside the hard drive brackets.

Time to crank it up and see of all these fans provide the cooling required.