Installation

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Open up that side panel, and you'll appreciate all the room you have to work with. 

The NXZT Whisper comes with plenty of installation hardware and more drive screws than you'll know what to do with.  A nice touch was there effort in making installation as simple as possible.  Not only are each and every bag of screws labeled properly, but there's even a sticker on the motherboard area clearly indicating where each standoff should be placed depending on the type of motherboard you will be installing.

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The Whisper is spacious enough to support all types of motherboards, including the extended ATX variety.  There's ample room to work comfortably, regardless of form factor.

The design of the case is clearly built around silence and they certainly do take every measure to eliminate unwanted noise.  This includes a rubber bracket that fits perfectly on an ATX PSU for a much more snug fit and to eliminate vibration.  Just place the bracket over the back end and mount it with it in place.

As far as installing your drives go, there are some very clever design features.  The external 5.25" bays do feature a tool-less design and you simply twist off one of the side locking brackets and just slide your drive in and twist and lock again.  Now, all internal bays are not tool-less, but that's fine with me actually.  Instead, they can easily be pull out for easy mounting of all your hard drives.  Now, unlike most cases I've seen the drives are screwed into place via the bottom instead of the side.  Now, what's really impressive about these brackets and method of install is the fact that they are all designed to support both 3.5" and 2.5" drives.  There are excellent rubber grommets that can be moved to support either size drive.  These also will further help eliminate any unwanted noise and/or vibration.

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Unfortunately, there were a few quality issues with this case and one in particular resorted to some minor soldering to fix it.  Apparently, the internal I/O and power cables were not loose enough and when completely removing the front panel to install the front external drives, the power connector for the front aluminum panel accent light broke, including the built-in resistor on the two-wire cable.  I've actually ran into similar issues regarding internal cables when it comes to removing the front panel of such enclosures.  With that said, I highly recommend you not only be extremely careful when removing it, but also focus on all cables as you are pulling the panel.  You don't want to excessively pull on one of these delicate cables and run into the issue I did with this case.

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Another nice feature is the completely independent bottom section of the case.  There are large enough holes to squeeze all your cables through, one for the PSU and one for your hard drives.  This will eliminate unnecessary cable clutter around the motherboard area.

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A final shot with all test components installed.  There's so much free space for better cable management and easy component install.  Also, this should help dissipate heat more efficiently and maintain all components cool.  With that said, let's jump to its cooling performance.

Performance

Before getting to the results, let's first look at the test system specs.  This particular test bed does contain a number of components that tend to run very hot. 

Temps where measured both at idle and under load. Idle temps were captured after at least one hour of operation. To load the system, Sisoftware's SANDRA 2009 was used.

In terms of the software utilities used, I will provide readings where applicable using SpeedFan and grab CPU core temps using CoreTemp. When using CoreTemp, the average temperature of both cores was recorded. Finally, more accurate surface temperatures were taken from components using the excellent ThermoHawk 200 touch-less thermometer.  Also note that I will be capturing temps from two hard drives, both installed two different areas in the enclosure.

Idle Temperatures

Numbers here made very good sense.  This same setup on a much smaller case had slightly higher numbers across the board.  The larger Whisper Tower and its excellent cooling features play a role in overall temperatures.

Load Temperatures

Nothing out of the norm here considering the setup chosen.  This case should provide adequate cooling with most configurations and should be excellent for rigs like my main system consisting of a cool running Quad-Core processor.  Also, there is one thing I wanted to prove in terms of my estimated guess regarding hard drive temps.  The main drive located near the two 80mm exhaust fans ran much cooler than the one purposely mounted near the front 120mm intake fan.  The beauty of this case is that you can easily pull out any of your drives and swap locations to determine the best spot for those key drives that will be accessed more frequently or tend to run much hotter.  Chances are, you'll find just the right spot for them.

Next:  Conclusions