Conclusions

A small machine that packs a big punch.

We’re really pleased with how this system turned out, because building it wasn’t easy. The Nzxt H1 is a fantastic case with a bunch of cool innovations that benefit its small form factor, but actually building in it is an exercise in cramped spaces and fiddly cabling. Were we to start afresh, we might wait until the motherboard cables are all in place before installing the memory, as it got in our way while we were trying to connect the ATX motherboard power cable.

Thankfully, though, once we closed the case up and plugged this bad boy in, it booted and ran perfectly straight away. Praise be! All too often we have to delve back in to rectify a little mistake that prevents a boot. Not this time around, though. We got our peripherals and monitor set up and boom, the pre-loaded copy of Windows 10 on the Corsair Force MP600 is up and running.

The first thing we noticed is the noise. Yes, this build isn’t exactly quiet, although it obviously pales in comparison to bigger, beefier machines. The main offender here is the Nvidia RTX 2080 Super FE; the flat twin fans are quite loud, though only when the card is running at load. We detect a faint bit of pump whine from the AIO cooler too, although the 140mm radiator fan seems to run quietly. The system makes very little noise when idling or during lowintensity tasks.

The Ryzen 9 3950X demolishes our benchmarks, as expected. This 16-core beast chews through CPU-bound tasks with ease, nailing great scores in Cinebench and Fry Render, among others. Gaming performance still lags a bit behind Intel, but this will only affect CPU-bound titles like Total War: Warhammer II. General graphical performance in games and real-time rendering is fantastic, which is no surprise given the powerful GPU we’re using. However, a factory-overclocked model of the RTX 2080 Super from a third-party manufacturer is liable to perform better.

In fact, we had originally planned to use an MSI graphics card for this build. All was going well until we reached Step 12… then couldn’t fit the GPU inside the case. We tried everything:

Removing the front I/O to clear some room, unscrewing the PCIe riser to plug it in before trying to mount the card, even disassembling the entire top half of the case. Nothing worked. But we’d checked the height clearance! Turns out that wasn’t our problem, though. The card we had initially chosen was too wide for the space. Learn from our mistakes, dear readers – find a compact card.

All-round performer

Anyway… back to assessing this build’s performance. It’s great across the board, really: Renders are speedy, and file transfers are more or less as fast as you’re going to get. The Force MP600 SSD gets mighty close to that coveted 5GB/s, although performance is a smidge lower than we were expecting: Probably because this B550 board can’t handle the drive quite as well as a more expensive X570. Still, you’re not likely to notice any difference in practice. The MP600 remains blazing fast, streamlining bulk data transfers and trivialising load times in games.

One area our system seemed to fall down on was memory performance. Although it wasn’t bad, the bandwidth tested in AIDA64 was lower than we had hoped for, and the real-world latency wasn’t exactly impressive either. Our memory was running at full speed (as confirmed by CPU-Z) and we double-checked

“The Ryzen 9 3950X demolishes our benchmarks, as expected. This 16-core beast chews through CPU-bound tasks with ease, nailing great scores in Cinebench and Fry Render, among others. Gaming performance still lags a bit behind Intel, but this will only affect CPU-bound titles like Total War: Warhammer II.”

“The 2080 Super is a fairly future-proofed choice of GPU, but should you feel a burning desire to upgrade once the inevitable RTX 3000 series arrives, it won’t be difficult to do so.”

that the MSI motherboard was definitely capable of fully supporting this RAM. This is our first time using a B550 board, and an ITX model at that, so it could be that these new budget boards just don’t handle high-capacity memory too well. Alternatively, the problem could lie with the memory itself; broadly speaking, we’d recommend you buy a proper kit of two. HyperX did actually send us our two in a single box, but we couldn’t find such a kit available anywhere online.

In any case, overall performance was solid. This system has all the hardware necessary to handle even the most demanding videography tasks from the comfort of your home office, and it certainly won’t take up much space. Compared to the previous machine on our test bench (read: dinner table) – last issue’s audio-recording build – the difference is night and day. The H1’s smart routing means that the cables for our peripherals and monitor neatly run from the rear of the base. The OS boot speed is delightfully fast.

This system runs cool, too; pushing the processor to the limit didn’t see much time spent in excess of 60C. That single-fan AIO is clearly working some serious overtime, doing plenty to justify the H1’s overall price. The metal outer casing felt ice cold even after we’d blown through multiple repeated benchmarks, demonstrating that Nzxt’s dual-chamber airflow design really works.

While we did play around with overclocking, the best option is simply to use AMD’s Ryzen Master software for auto-overclocking. We were just about able to hit a stable 4.2GHz overclock manually, but the automated alternative reliably gave us 4.3GHz at load and is gentler on the processor. Auto-overclocking did still see a significant temperature increase, but nothing to be concerned by. Ryzen Master’s primary benefit was in single-core performance, which is effectively lost if you choose to overclock manually.

Look to the future

There’s some potential for upgrades here too. While a 2TB

M.2 drive is nice, anyone who works with 4K video will know that it likely won’t be enough in the long run, especially if you’d like to keep a few games on your system too (looking at you, Call of Duty). There’s one extra aspect of the Nzxt H1 we’ve yet to mention: The toolless SSD tray. This makes installing an extra SATA SSD or two a cakewalk, and with Samsung promising cheaper 8GB 2.5-inch drives in the near future, we might consider calling time of death on HDDs in high-end systems.

Upgrading the graphics card is also a straightforward process, as it’s only secured by two thumbscrews and a small clasp on the PCIe riser. The 2080 Super is a fairly future-proofed choice of GPU, but should you feel a burning desire to upgrade once the inevitable RTX 3000 series arrives, it won’t be difficult to do so. The S650 power supply means that there’s a reasonable amount of headroom when it comes to power.

Changing components like the SSD and processor will likely prove more challenging, but both are high-quality choices so we feel confident that they’ll last a while. If you do need to upgrade the PSU to allow sufficient wattage for your upgrades, brace yourself for a challenge. The plastic frame of the case needs to be partially disassembled in order to detach the PSU shroud and access this compact power brick.

As a finished build, it doesn’t look like much. The window of the H1 matte black edition is tinted, providing very limited views inside, but there’s not much to see when it’s removed anyway: Just the edges of the GPU and motherboard, and the solid black metal of the PSU shroud, with some black cables packed tightly around it all. That’s perfect, though; this system oozes clean professionalism, and would look equally good in a small home study or an open-plan office. Mission accomplished.