NZXT Tempest EVO Mid Tower Case Review

The System Build

I enjoyed the ambient blue glow that the LED’s provided for a short time. It’s a matter of preference if you like lighted cases or not; personally, I tend to prefer no lights, or at least the ability to turn them off. The LED’s in the NZXT Tempest EVO aren’t super bright so I would be able to get used to them, I think.

Much of the build was nice and easy. Of course there was a hiccup or two here and there. The one that got to me the most was installing the stand offs for the motherboard. Two or three of the stand offs could not be screwed in by hand. It felt as if they holes weren’t tapped all the way through or that there was paint in the threads. Being that the motherboard tray is made of sheet metal, this was remedied with a little bit of elbow grease and a nut driver. It took me longer to find the nut driver that my wife or two year old hid on me than to run the stand offs in. The situation was quickly remedied and I moved on. The only other minor setback came when installing the power supply. One of the rubber bumpers had fallen off and had to be located. Again, it was a quick and easy fix. I would have liked to have seen the rubber bumpers screwed into place, but once the power supply was in place the bumpers couldn’t go anywhere.

In order to remove the hard drives from the top cage you will need to remove the graphics card from the system. Personally, I wasn’t real impressed with the way the hard drives mount. Having to remove the entire hard drive cage or the video card to remove a single drive was a bit of a letdown. Though realistically how often will you have to do this? Unless you get a string of bad drives, most likely not very often. With my gripes about the mounting and removal of the hard drives aside, I had no concerns about my drive coming loose while in transport to a LAN game.

Behind the motherboard tray there was plenty of room to hide all the wires. It was also nice to close the door with little to no pressure.

The cut out for the CPU back plate lined up great in the NZXT Tempest EVO. If you are planning on changing out CPU coolers you should have no issues removing or changing the CPU back plate.