NZXT Panzerbox Mid Tower Case Review

Interior Impressions


With the side panel removed, we’re greeted with a somewhat spacious interior. We were immediately surprised by the very simple interior; especially the hard drive mounting locations.


The whole cage that houses the three 5.25 inch bays and two internal 3.5 inch bays is essentially one piece of welded aluminum. It is actually completely removable using small case screws, which was a nice feature in our eyes as someone may wish to remove this cage for modding purposes. You’ll also notice that small aluminum fins protrude from the cage. Unfortunately, these fins appear to be mainly on the 5.25 inch bays, which don’t need nearly as much cooling as the hard drives in the 3.5 inch bays below. This is mainly a cosmetic thing in our opinion.


Toward the front of the case, we see a very simple hard drive cage and the massive 190mm intake fan. Unlike many modern cases with six, seven or more hard drive bays, NZXT opted to provide only four. To be perfectly honest, those with a half-dozen hard drives are few and far between and the vast majority of buyers will have only one or two at the most. With that said, we think that NZXT’s decision to keep the intake fan unobstructed and cut down on drive bays was a wise one. Two 3.5 inch internal drive bays can also be found just above the lower cage and both of these mounting locations will receive airflow from the front intake fan. The only disadvantage to the lower cage is that drives mounted here will block intake airflow to the expansion slot area of the motherboard to some degree.


The top of the Panzerbox is dominated by yet another large 190mm oversize fan, rated for 150CFM. We’ll take a closer look at the Panzerbox’s watercooling potential shortly, but with over 3.5 inches of clearance between the top of the case and the motherboard, there is a healthy amount of spacing for “creative” cooling solutions.

The two watercooling grommets also allow tubing into this space above the motherboard. We should make special mention of the grommets, which are made of a very soft and flexible compound. Many cases use thick and heavy grommets that are difficult to manipulate, so we were pleased to see this.


Toward the back of the case, we get an inside view of the Panzerbox’s most distinguishing feature; the PSU mounting location. As you can see, it is lined up perfectly with the expansion slots. We’ll get more into this feature in the “Installation” and “Cooling Performance” sections.


A standard set of header leads can be found in the Panzerbox. The USB and audio leads are covered by black insulation, but the switch and LED headers are unfortunately a rainbow of colors. Given the nice painted black interior of the Panzerbox, it would have been nice to see sleeved or black insulated cables all around. This is a very minor gripe though, especially considering the lack of a side window on the Panzerbox.

One feature that we absolutely love, and wish that other case manufacturers would implement is the removable front panel leads. They simply connect to pin headers on a small PCB protruding at the top of the case. If you don’t care to use the eSATA connector or one of the other connectors, simply remove the cable! There is nothing worse than having to hide away unused header leads, so this is a very welcome feature.