NZXT Panzerbox Mid Tower Case Review

Cooling Performance pg.2


Hard drive cooling is an often overlooked aspect of case cooling, but it is perhaps one of the most important. It is a fact that hard drives kept cool outlive hard drives that run at higher temperatures. This becomes even more important with high-RPM drives like the Western Digital Raptor series. As you can see, the drive in the open bench configuration received no active cooling, and quickly exceeded 40°C.

Thanks to the large amount of intake airflow, the Panzerbox does an excellent job keeping hard drives cool. Even in the top mounting location, we were able to realize a full three degree decrease over the Storm Scout.


The Panzerbox does very well at keeping our Antec Signature PSU cool. Thanks to the large amount of intake airflow, the PSU is constantly being fed cool air through its front intake grille. We’ll take a closer look at PSU cooling shortly, as very different behaviour is realized with PSUs with bottom mounted fans.


In order to see what kind of an impact a bottom mounted fan PSU would have on the Panzerbox, we threw our trusty Corsair TX-750 into the case. As you can see the additional exhaust flow from around the video cards made a fairly significant improvement in GPU temperatures.


Even the CPU temperature decreased a full degree simply by swapping out the PSU for one with a bottom mounted exhaust fan. Although the PSU does not directly provide extra cooling to the CPU area of the case, the overall internal temperature is decreased thanks to better GPU exhaust flow.


All of these great cooling benefits do come at a price, unfortunately. It’s no secret that the PSU is drawing in awfully toasty air from around the video cards and as a result, we saw a fairly high PSU exhaust temperatures. Noticeably warm air was flowing out of the case through the PSU exhaust grille when we used the Corsair unit in this orientation. Please do keep in mind that these two power supplies are very different, and that their temperatures should not be viewed as an apples-to-apples comparison.

Most modern PSUs should ramp up fan speed if things begin to get too hot, but exposing a PSU to high internal temperatures is not going to aid in its long term reliability. Although using a high quality PSU is always our recommendation – regardless of the case being used – we’d definitely stress its importance if you choose to mount the PSU to draw in hot GPU exhaust.

Thankfully, those with bottom mounted PSU fans are not forced to intake warm air from the expansion cards. Simply mounting the PSU in the opposite orientation lines up the fan with the vent on the side panel and the PSU can draw in cool air from outside of the case. You simply won’t get the added benefit of improved GPU exhausting.