Installation Impressions
Keen to build a system with the NZXT H440, we knew exactly what motherboard to pair with this orange and black case: the identically themed Gigabyte Z97X-SOC Force. As you can see in the image below it looked right at home. Best yet for extreme gamers, this combo will allow for quad GPUs.
With the motherboard installed and all the top panel connectivity hooked up, we moved around to the back of the H440 where we inserted the power supply and hooked up some of the cables.
This brought us around to the right side of the case where the hard drive trays are found. Above is a photo of the tray with our quick modification to allow dual drive support by drilling four holes. This allowed us to use NZXT's pre-drilled holes for a hard drive underneath the tray rather than on top. Then it was simply a matter of mounting another drive above with the holes we drilled.
The only catch – besides restricting airflow and having to drill the holes – is that you need to use screws with a slim profile head so the trays still slide into place.
Above is a photo of the NZXT outfitted with six 3.5" hard drives, the maximum number it is intended to fit. As you can see, there is a huge amount of empty space between the drives.
Now here is the H440 with our modification doing something few if any mid-tower can do: comfortably hold 11 3.5" hard drives. There is still 10mm of clearance between every second drive which should let enough air flow into the system.
The most important thing about this modification isn't necessarily even the ability to install 11 hard drives but rather that it would allow you to install enough drives into the H440 in the event that you remove trays for lengthy graphics cards.
The only other note we will make about the drive trays is that users have to be careful when removing and installing them as they fall out easily until screwed into place, smashing into the drive below.
With the hard drives in place we spun the H440 back around to the left side and installed the new Noctua NH-D15 heatsink along with the Gigabyte Radeon R9 290X OC graphics card. The H440 makes it quick and easy to route the PCIe power cables for the graphics card and with almost no effort at all we have an incredibly clean build that looks like a million bucks.
Like the internals, the rear of the H440 also looks very clean, the black I/O shield of the Z97X-SOC Force helps a lot here. It is almost as if Gigabyte's board was made for the H440 or vice versa.