Penguin power
Changing pronoun from the APC “we” to the personal “I” for a moment, this machine marks a proud moment. It’s the neatest PC I have ever built and, after only a tiny bit of troubleshooting — one forgotten front panel connector — it ran perfectly. Well... mostly. We’ll come to that. NZXT’s H400i is so well designed it almost generates its own logic; once it’s stripped and clear, an easy process with only a little screwdriver-slinging, it all but invites you to build your PC right.
Not that we did exactly. There were missteps — 10 minutes fighting to screw in the M.2 SSD after forgetting to add its tiny standoff to the mobo, and placing the milky white case side on a not-so-clean surface — and there are a few things we’d do differently if we were to do it all again. The fans, for example, each connect to their own extension cables, but the H400i’s integrated fan controller cables would have reached them directly.
Cable combs might have made the motherboard’s 24-pin power connector less tentacly and more uniform. Doubling the build time to route the cables neatly around the back would have been mentally pleasing, but quite unnecessary.
We’ve yet to work out why we’ve been unable to initialise the M.2 drive on board, but it’s seen in the BIOS and in Windows, so it’s probably ridiculously simple. Aside from that, performance is spectacular for a machine of this price, and it’s cool and quiet, even when taking a hammering. Partly, that’s down to the CPU. When it first dropped, we half ignored its potential, but the quad-core Core i3-8350K pulls off solid rendering performance, solid gaming, solid everything, all at a price that redefines the low end. It’s unlocked, so we could clock it up even higher if push came to shove — the massive amount of cooling we’ve built into the case will take care of it, and the extensive reservoir of excess power in the RM750x PSU means we’re more than ready for chips with a higher TDP, or a fatter GPU.
Benchmark results, if anything, were a touch higher than we were expecting on the CPU side, and about where we’d thought they would land on the GPU side. While, of course, they lag behind the numbers of the R9 Fury X in our APC Labs test build — no surprises there — that GeForce GTX 1060 out of context is no slouch, and it’s a good entry-level choice that will keep you going (at its level) until you’re ready to invest in one of its heavier siblings. Perhaps, were we to do this build again, we would invest a little less in a storage solution that we couldn’t get to work, and more in a 1070, or even a 1070 Ti — just as long as we could find a white one, that is.