Introduction

Tempest from NZXT is a steel mid-tower case targeted to enthusiasts, with a transparent side window and nine 5 ¼” bays, eight internal 3 ½” bays for hard disk drives divided into two cages supporting four drives each (each cage takes three 5 ¼” bays) and six fans (one on the rear, one on the side panel, two on the top and two on the front). Let’s take an in-depth look on this new release from NZXT.

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Figure 1: NZXT Tempest case.

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Figure 2: NZXT Tempest case.

On Figure 3 you can see the front panel from this case. As you can see, this case doesn’t have a door. It has nine 5 ¼” bays and each hard disk drive cage uses three of them, so you have only three 5 ¼” bays available on the case’s default configuration. You can remove one of the hard disk drive cages to increase the number of available 5 ¼” bays if you need more of this kind of bay and don’t have a lot of hard disk drives.

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Figure 3: Front panel.

On the top of the case you can find a panel containing two USB ports, one eSATA port, mic in and headphones jacks and also the power and reset buttons. Even though this case offers one eSATA port, which is great, this panel could be better, especially for a case that is targeted to enthusiasts. We think it could have one Firewire port. It would be also nice to see four USB ports instead of two. Also, the two available USB ports are too close to each other, preventing you from using them at the same time if you have two “fat” devices – pen drives, for example.

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Figure 4: Connectors available on the top panel.

On Figure 5 you can see the top panel from this case, where it has two 140-mm fans.

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Figure 5: Top panel.

Finally we have the rear panel on Figure 6. On this case the power supply is installed on the bottom part of the case. Also on the lower section you can see two holes that can be used by water cooling systems. This case has seven slots like almost all cases and on the top part you can see the rear 120-mm fan which comes with it. The left side panel is fastened to the case using two thumbscrews but the right panel uses regular screws.

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Figure 6: Rear panel.

Let’s see how Tempest looks like inside.

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