Wrap Up: Clean Looks and Feature Packed. What's Not to Love?
Compared to the Corsair Obsidian 450D we looked at a month ago, the NZXT H440 offers a heck of a lot more for the same $120. Out of the box, Corsair's solution only supports three 3.5" hard drives and that might have been acceptable if the rest of the case was stacked with features, but that isn't the situation.
The H400 has smarter cable management, supports twice as many storage devices (pre-mod), has extras such as a fan hub and LEDs, it's just as well equipped for air cooling and it offers better water cooling support being the only mid-tower we know of that can accept a 360mm radiator in the front and/or top.
Next to the 450D, the H440 is slightly bigger (2L roomier) but because of the heavy plastic and steel it weighs a little over 40% more at 10kg – heavy for a gaming case, but not unacceptable in our opinion. It's fair to say that the one thing we would change about the H440 is the one thing that we did change.
Drilling extra holes in each storage tray to mount a drive above and below allowed us to fit an awesome 11 3.5" drives, so even if you excluded a few trays for the additional GPU headroom, you'd still be able to fit half a dozen drives in the H440. Doing so may dent but not wreck your cooling performance.
As far as aesthetics go, orange isn't a color I would pick but it has admittedly grown on me, especially with an equally funky motherboard such as the Gigabyte Z97X-SOC Force to match. Regardless, there are plenty of options with red, blue, green and white variants also available for the same price.
The only issue I have with the H440's external design is the fact that its matte black steel panels are fingerprint magnets. Just getting the case into respectable shape for pictures was a job in itself. No matter how hard I scrubbed with a micro fiber cloth some of the finger marks just wouldn't come off.
That spoiled the H440 a little for me, but it seems forgivable if you aren't going to handle the case too often. Features and fingerprints aside, the amount of thought NZXT put into this design practically guarantees new builders will wind up with something that looks like it shipped from a boutique shop.
Pros: The H440 makes it easy to achieve a professional-looking build, it runs cool with four 140mm fans from the factory, and it supports huge gear like 360mm radiators or up to 11 HDDs via mod. What's not to love?
Cons: Fingerprints. For the love of Gaben, please test for hand grease on your surface materials before production. It would have also been nice to see a little more innovation with the empty 5.25" bay area.