Internal and External Features

Inside the Whisper, things start to get a little bit more interesting. On the side panels, you can see the 10mm thick noise dampening foam, with necessary cutouts to allow a tight seal on the frame. Looking at the inside of the Whisper, you see that NZXT has decided to engineer a chamber separator, with up to nine hard drives supported in the lower portion, and the rest of the components going in the upper portion. Hard drives are held in small form factor trays that are easily removable and utilize small grommets on the screw holes to cut down on vibration noises. The lower chamber is where the previously mentioned 120mm fan is located, as well as two 80mm exhaust fans, just above the power supply mount.




In the upper chamber, you have mounting holes for all motherboard form factors, from microATX to Extended ATX. NZXT even put a small decal with a guide that makes it easy to identify the proper mounting holes for the stand-off screws, making it a snap to mount your motherboard. The motherboard tray has two cutouts to allow for some wiring and cables to rout behind the panel, improving airflow. There is also an access hole between the chamber seperater for routing hard drive cables. At the rear of the case is the single 120mm exhaust fan, just above the two water tubing ports. The Whisper supports up to six 5.25” devices in the upper chamber and the bays utilize a simple click-lock mechanism to securely hold them in place.

One thing that we immediately noticed when looking over the Whisper is the lack of an air intake for the upper chamber. With three fans cooling the bottom chamber, not including any that may be in your power supply, we have no doubt that your hard drives would be kept well cooled. But can the Whisper keep your mainboard, graphics card and CPU cool by only utilizing a single 120mm exhaust fan? We’ll find out in the next page, but first how we tested.

System Setup

AMD Athlon X2 5000+ Black Edition @ 3.05Ghz
Gigabyte GA-MA790FX-DS5
OCZ Reaper 2x4GB PC8500 5-5-5 DDR2 RAM
ATI Radeon X1800
Western Digital 300GB SATA
Lite-On LH-20A1S DVDRW