Review – NZXT Whisper
For 10 to 12 hours a day during the week I work in a small office with wooden floors and a low ceiling and every noise is amplified, not the least of which being my pc with it’s 6 fans (not including the fan on my graphics card which beats them all). It’s not until a power outage, or re-arranging the office when everything is shut off do you realize just how much racket a PC can make and that it’s time for a change. Enter NZXT’s WHISPER Classic Series chassis, engineered from top to bottom to provide a quieter computing experience.
Assembling an ultimate gaming rig or digital audio workstation based on the WHISPER chassis is an enjoyable task thanks to its smart layout and a pre-drilled wire management system that makes routing cables a snap. One thing to keep in mind when putting a system together is the length of the cables coming from the power supply and the positioning of the power connections on the motherboard, some motherboards have their power connections placed towards the top which can for an impossible reach for some power supplies.
Today’s games and digital media take up a lot of space and with the price-per-gigabyte of storage space falling all the time, it’s not uncommon to have several hard drives in a pc. The WHISPER provides plenty of room for stuffing terabytes worth of storage space with its nine hard drive bays, even including brackets to support newer 3.5″ SSD drives for those that can’t be bothered with balancing their sensitive data on spinning plates. It also provides six 5.25″ bays with front facing panels for media drives and expansion cards.
So how does NZXT’s WHISPER keep quiet? It uses 10mm noise-dampening foam pads on the side and top panels to deaden noise before it exits the case. Rubber grommets on the hard drives and a padded PSU holder reduce the amount of vibration within the case.
Does all that effort really make a difference? Speaking as someone who’s been cooped up in this small office for long periods of time I was amazed when I turned on the machine, half-expecting just to hear a dulled version of the “BEEP whhooooooOOOOOOOOOOSSSSHHH” of my motherboard and video card on bootup all that came from the box was a mulled “beep.”
In all, after two weeks of working in much quieter environment I would have to say that on a day to day basis it’s made my workspace a much more peaceful and enjoyable place to get things accomplished. The NZXT WHISPER manages to deliver on it’s goal of a quiet PC and manages to do it with a simple and no-frills design that (silently) screams elegance. The WHISPER carries an MSRP of $139.99.
