NZXT PODCAST - #194 - Case-A-Thon #2 (Ft. Kevin)

Episode Date: March 20, 2025

On this week's episode of the NZXT Podcast... We have our product manager, Kevin, joining us to talk about the design process behind our legendary NZXT cases! Save up to 38% on NZXT cases on Amazon! https://nzxt.co/43RyEDE

Hello, everyone. We're going a little early, so I'm a little excited about this. Welcome to episode 194 at the NCC podcast, the official podcast at the NZC community. This podcast recorded live on Fridays at 10 a.m. Pacific Standard Time on the official NCC Twitch. It is available to stream on demand on Apple Podcast, Spotify and SoundCloud. My name is Mike, and as always, Ivan, you are always here with me. How are you doing? How we do, baby boo?

Happy Kaysathon number two. We have a very special guest today, but before I introduce them, I do want to make some quick announcements. Announcement number one. If you are tuned in live today on Twitch.tv slash nzxte. You're in for a treat. We have a giveaway. Type exclamation giveaway in the chat for your chance to win three NZXT cases.

Well, you're not going to win three. Three people win one case. I don't know what you would do with three cases if you got them. But, yeah, winners choice. So, yeah, three people get to this. decide which case they want. So that's announcement number one. And stick around to the end of the stream.

You get a secret word for a bunch of bonus entries into the giveaway. Announcement number two is we are celebrating the caseathon. And as part of the celebration, we are offering some major discounts on NZXT cases. So if you live in the Google US of A, head over to the NZXT Amazon store. It's nzxti.co slash Amazon. And you can save up to 38% on a beautiful NZXT case. So, G-G, so thank you, everyone, for tuning in live. As I mentioned, it's episode number two of the Caseathon.

And with us today is Kevin. Kevin from the product team. Kevin, how are you? Great. Happy to be here. You sound super excited, Kevin. No, I mean, definitely. I'm just teasing you, man.

Yeah, you've been here at NZT for over a decade. I can't believe I've known you for 10 years already, man. Please tell everyone how did you get started at NZT? Yeah, so I was originally hired out of our Taipei office, so I used to be based in Taiwan and started as a marketing specialist. So at the time, the company was really, really small. I would say the team there are no more than 15

and then the U.S., I think we only had like 30 or 40. But yeah, it was one of three marketing specialists hired to take products to market, writing PR and all of the marketing assets. And eventually moved on to a product management role, which kind of got me here now. So came back to the U.S. two years ago. And, yeah, working with the teams here and out of Taipei.

So, yeah, it's been a long ride. So what does a typical day look like for you now as a product manager? I mean, it changes here and there. But, yeah, today, you start the day with going through email, the Slack chats, everything, you know, information travels quickly. And, you know, with Slack, you know, you have to stay on top of some of the immediate requests. And then there's the emails. And, you know, in terms of product management, we're, you know, always constantly thinking about what's sort of over the horizon.

So, you know, a quick follow-up on where markets headed, you know, market updates, and, you know, working with the teams on day-to-day development of, you know, what's to come. There's a whole lot of development stuff going on. Yeah, so, like, over, since you've been here for so long, like, What are some, like, fun and, like, challenging products that you specifically have worked on, especially during your time here? I think last time I was on the call, you know, we, I talked about Krakins because at the time I was driving the liquid cooler parts. You know, in recent years, you know, working on H6, the H7, you know, both of which, you know, both of which were layouts that we weren't traditionally used to.

So it really required the team to do really deep investigations into what those layouts means in terms of performance. And when we were making cases with like solid front panels and very sort of limited airflow, by the way, it was limited not so much compared to what it is now. Because remember the H5 with the front solid panel, it was reviewed as the best airflow case of its time, right? So I guess everything's relative, right? And today we are going down the path of making sure performance hits the marks. And so, yeah, working on H6, H7, you know, thinking about those layouts, what those implications would become for, you know, how the case would ultimately look.

Those are hard to come around. I remember, I remember H5 and H500 and H510 people being like, there's no airfoil. I had, I had both. And they were amazing, like, my temps never went. I had like a 2070 in that thing and like my Tufts never went above 60. Like I don't know how people were like saying like, why my the parts are being cooked right now in this case.

There's no airfare. It was totally great. Like for the parts back then, it was amazing. Yeah. And yeah. And everything sort of changes, right? TDP has gone up and, you know, maybe fan performance comes into play.

Yeah, but being a product manager is always about, okay, what are all of these components that are being, you know, in this space? And how do we optimize for, you know, a lot of it for the PCDII and also for just PCs in general? Yeah, and that's actually a great segue into what I wanted to discuss with you next, which was just the overall philosophy. and approach that you and your team take into a consideration when it comes to making a case. I'm curious, Kevin, like, when you're working on a new case, what is the first thing your team considers? That's always, like, a hard one. You know, performance is definitely one of the top baseline that, you know, we go by. because at the end of the day,

you're buying something that is essentially going to house all of your components and how we sort of measure performance in terms of thermals and maybe noise. Those have to be sort of at the back end. And then we always consider how well it's going to be. to look at the end of the day. So balancing that performance and the looks, aesthetics, it's not always easy. And with layout changes, that sort of throws a wrench in what used to be, you know, tried and true.

And I know it's not easy, but how do you do it? How do you actually balance? I would say we have a great team of mechanical engineers and industrial designers that I work really closely with, Gus out in Taipei, Shen. Yeah, so I'd say with the teams and all of the different inputs that we get throughout the company. And I think that's the thing about our culture here, where we keep it as transparent and open as possible internally. And, you know, we always ask around, hey, what do you guys think of this? You know, are we, you know, it's like your first impression, if it's like a big red flag goes up, yeah, that's something we're like, okay, maybe maybe that's not the path to take. I think with the culture and the team, just our global, you know, presence and all the members that, you know, all the members that,

are involved. We get some good feedback. Hopefully earlier than say later. Because once you're in tooling, there's no going back, right? Play of no return. I have a question. What type of red flags are you looking for?

Is it like, oh, the temps aren't working well? Or is it more like, oh, this doesn't look right? yeah so I think the H7 I would say in recent well years because it took us about a year to develop it and we launched it mid last year year when we thought of that layout you know the first impression was like this thing is awkward this thing looks so weird you know there's the negative space along the bottom but and you know we tested temperatures and it was great you know it it it was open we had room for you know if 3 140 fans in the front you know because positioning the power supply vertically that allowed us to you know stretch the case up so that we could support

420s and in the past historically age 7 couldn't support 420 mounting and you know testing the performance, taking a look at it. I think we went through a couple of ID iterations, industrial design. And at first it was just really weird. But the more that we look at it, the more we think, hey, this thing is actually can't stand on its own. Now, whether the product performs well in terms of sales,

or that's the whole other thing. And hopefully, you know, people grow to like it as opposed to, yeah, this thing is just weird and maybe it was a bad idea. So you don't know until you launch it and how well it does in the market. So the market determines a lot. Like people obviously will make cases for people to look and buy because they like it. or they like the looks of it or the performance of it. So like, especially with NZXT, like we're kind of known for like having the very clean, simple aesthetic.

Like you just look at the case and go, yeah, that's an NXC case. Like, how do you decide on like how you're going to build it? Like with the materials, you know, like what made you guys decide to go, you know, we'll do 420 radiator front. Like how do you, how do you decide? side on all that, like how it's a process like? Yeah, so in terms of building roadmaps and building tiers of paces, we really have to think about various price segments, various price bands,

and various competitor products in those price bands. And for us right now, we sort of have it defined as, you know, this type of look, and you got various sizes to choose from. So, you know, with the more traditional layout, the H5 and 7, you know, it's the mid-towers, and then it's about tiering the sort of cooling potential. And then for something like a dual chamber, the H-6 and 9, you know, 6, we went in and we made sure that we were sort of laser focused on what people really need, right? To get a build up and going, it's not like you have to have mounting locations for radiators, you know,

everywhere. So we sort of make tradeoffs on deciding where to cut and how do we position that product so that it's pretty much all you need for you know the latest modern components that are going in and what you mentioned about looks and aesthetics and how minimalistic we can get it's there's a little bit of a double-edged sword there because you know we try to go as clean as possible but you know how do we make it sort of iconic nzxte versus hey this thing just looks generic and you know any slap any other brand name on it and it could have been you know what they what say i don't know competitor b um you know could put out as well so finding that balance adding i don't know if it's you know nzc flare or lack thereof um yeah it comes back to a lot of that. And I think, well,

our CEO, Johnny, has been pretty involved in product in the past. And we always make sure that, hey, well, we're creating, I think he has a really good sense of the competitive products out there. So, inputs, having those inputs

have always been appreciated as well. Yeah. You know, what's interesting to me when I look at this image here that Mike, that Mike is basically all five of these cases have amazing airflow. And like you were saying earlier, there was a time in the history of NZXT where it was literally a meme that NZXT did not have airflow. Like we would make memes on social media because people would think that, you know, our cases were just hot boxes.

But that's definitely not the case anymore. No pun intended there. My question to you is, you know, now that airflow is such a priority in our cases, how do you approach airflow optimization in general? And second part is like, second part of that question is, why is airflow such a big focus now? Yeah. So the way we look at it generationally now is,

you know, we now have a more extensive team of engineers that are setting sort of baseline how we compare ourselves against the previous generation of H-7s. So establishing those baselines, we consider, okay, what are areas that we can improve upon.

And then in terms of the next generation, we make sure that how we compare to the previous generation, we at least have some levels of improvement. Whether that's a stock configuration or like a fully built-out configuration, we're always seeing if we are making breakthroughs

in sort of pushing more or lower temps, especially on the C-Based. and GPU, and using sort of the latest components to kind of compare against the previous gen as well. So yeah, comparing ourselves and also all the other competitor, latest products that they bring to the market and sort of is, you know, make sure that we're well positioned. in terms of where we compete. Yeah, and I think a lot of times, too,

we're kind of competing against ourselves in some ways, looking at what we've done in the past and what worked and what didn't. And here in the chat, someone, I think it was, what's their name here? With the X, Phil Nuts. I think they brought up that the case timeline, we showed last week. So Mike, can you pull it up again real quick? And I want Kevin here to walk us through

the evolution of NZXT cases over the over the years. Because I do think it's actually quite interesting when you see like where we started and how we ended up here. And there's definitely some cases where you look at them and you're like, oh, so that's how that's how the you know, H-440 came to be or that's how the H-710 became a thing. But I just want to go back 10 years to like when Kevin started here.

We won't go back to the very beginning. Maybe I can give some insights into how sort of case development and sort of creation has sort of come about. And, you know, in the past it was taking

tooled, like chassis, steel frames. and then applying plastic, you know, bezels and plastic injection mold front pieces and sort of calling it a day. So you really, there wasn't really much you can do unless you started your own tool. So in the past, it was, you know, mostly about how do I create this front facade to, you know,

differentiate myself? and then what happens within the chassis layouts, that's more or less defined by maybe it's the supplier that we're working with. You know, that's something they had. So when we got ourselves into a position where we are doing our own tools, thinking up layout, what do people actually need, that opens up, you know, a lot more flexibility and, and what we can do.

So going back, um, you know, prior to me joining, um, you know, a lot of times it's, it's really about how it looks externally.

And, you know, at the time, our, um, brand slogan was, you know, craft,

uh, craft, uh, craft a gaming armor or is that, yeah. Yeah. It was, um,

you know, we come a long way from there. And, I don't know, if it's more mature now in terms of looks. I don't know, maybe that comes with age as well. But yeah, it's minimalism. We're hoping to make cases that can withstand a test of time, right?

You look at it a year from now, hopefully it doesn't look outdated, and then you want something else. because these PCs essentially are should last a user three years minimum, right? They should buy a new one every six months though, right, Kevin? For sure.

Maybe on a secondary build, you know, maybe. When you look at this timeline here, which is your favorite case? I mean, some of the ones that stood out for me especially is you know, like the H440 and, you know, the S340. I think that's, those two are the cases that kind of got us to where we are today. You know, the H440 was the first that we introduced the PSU shroud. Then everybody sort of just followed on that.

And then the S340 was about how do we get, you know, make the, make tradeoffs. you know, what is the modern PC of that time? What are those minimum things that we have to, have to, I guess, create compatibility for and shrink the profile of the compact mid-tower. And at the same time, it just looks like a box, right? And it's clean in terms of what it offers. But, yeah, those two cases, you know, we were first to remove the five and a quarter inch bays.

But it opened up where case layouts and designs are, you know, for the majority of, I guess, the cases out there. Yeah. I talked about that briefly on last week's stream where if you look at the initial reaction to that case in 2014, people thought NZT was crazy. People were saying things like, how am I going to install my video games? It's kind of funny you think about now,

but back then, you know, high-speed internet was not as prevalent as it is now, which kind of goes to show. You kind of have to design for the future, not the present, right? Yeah. I just remember, because I was based in Taiwan at the time, and, you know, our sales rep selling to the Japanese market,

they're like, where do I put my, you know, DVD ROM drives? Because, you know, Japan is a market that was slow to transition away from CDs. And given that you no longer can with this case, that was a big red flag for them because they rely on, you know, CD-ROMs. They still go, had Tower record. they still had all of those people you know

and I guess digital music wasn't you know like it is today Spotify didn't exist you know everything people were playing MP3s so yeah I remember it was

everything everything was DVDed you know I remember I had plans versus zombies that was like what of the first like CDPC games I ever had and And when I transitioned to the H500, I'm like, whoa, where does this go?

And I think a great quote that people don't realize is like you said, building for the future than like more for like the present because I mean back then when the car came out, people were like, this is stupid. It goes slower than a horse. And you know, all the carriage, you know, horse drivers were just like, yeah, I'm like, this is stupid. Why would anyone do something like this? and then now look at all that.

So it's just kind of state of how evolution and technology kind of advances. Yeah. Speaking of evolution, let's dig deeper into the current case lineup here. So, you know, we were talking about it earlier, but I do want to go over the differences between these five cases here

that we're showing on the screen, which are the, H1, H5, H7, H6, and H9. Kevin can you start with the lowest number and work your way up and just tell everyone what the differences are here. Yeah, so the H1 is definitely a unique one out of the mix. That one, we were aiming to make small form factor easy. And I think today, well, I don't know that it's shown here, but it is a product that we have. discontinued but you know in thinking about that case that was the case that we wanted to

make jumping into a small build easy and therefore we included power supply a liquid cooler to kind of get builds up and running i literally did did a build in like 10 minutes and then for someone that was an experience we you know clocked them in at maybe somewhere around like 20 minutes or something like that because all of the cables were pretty much pre-wired and you just kind of need to drop it in and and put it in place and then moving on to like the five so the five has always been positioned where this is like for the masses you need a PC up and going you know, affordability is one thing that you consider, you know, following on the S340 to the H500s to, you know, right now the H5, that's always been the main consideration. What are some of the, you know, specs I would need to get a PC up and going?

And then the H7 is sort of the bigger brother to that. Now that you're in this PC space and you want higher cooling potential, you know, more fans to put, you know, into the build, bigger GPUs. You want to make sure that those are, you know, in terms of thermals, you got, you know, bottom intake fans that, you know, aren't going to be obstructed. So that would be like the, the bigger case to choose. And then the H6, the H6 actually followed our H9 case.

So when we did the H9, it was about bringing that panoramic view to, and sort of our take on it, because the market seems to be, well, at the time, it was all about GPU is getting chunkier, and therefore a dual chamber can make sense because you then have bottom intake fans. And so H9 kind of got it there, and then we made sure that that panoramic view into PCs,

that was like the low-hanging fruit, I would say, in terms of dual chambers. And then today you look at cases now, it's like everything has a panoramic. and so the H6, it was about taking that, making it more compact, making it more affordable, and then what are some performance optimizations we could do? Do I truly need so many, you know,

radiator mounting locations when we know 90 plus percent are, you know, they just have a liquid cooler on their CPU. So, yeah, it's, that's sort of what got us to our current lineup and yeah and I think there's something that I feel like there's something in this current lineup that people still don't know about or underutilizing is there anything that you think that people that you've noticed when people build in these cases is there's like a feature or something in these cases that people aren't utilizing enough?

I wouldn't say not utilizing, but it's more... Maybe it's the trickiness of cable management. And as you know, building a PC, cable management has always been this thing that we try to make easy and simpler because that's probably the most daunting task at the towards the end of any build. Right? You got everything connected, but is it going? through sort of the right pass-through holes. And, you know, I saw a build yesterday where, yeah, the 16-pin was sort of coming out from the top

and then dangling down to a GPU on an H-7. Oh. So, yeah, I guess that's a thing that doesn't always come naturally. And, you know, we provide. various points and maybe that's a piece of education that we could maybe guide user towards and you know what's the best utilization of you know which which cut out and then sort of of guide users to you know how they should be routing their cable so that they could achieve you know a clean look or a cleaner look yeah I guess I kind of also transition

into my next two questions is like cable management is like a huge deal when building a PC but also to a lot of builders themselves because you know there's that meme of like oh you just put the front or the back panel on and you forget about your cables and everything like that uh do you think that like the ncc cases like help with cable management that a lot of people especially for myself as well like builders dread cable managing do you think our cases kind of help with that yeah i mean we we we try to make sure our channels and the way we have cables you know that are sort of naturally um wired up where they need to go that there are sort of tie down points or built-in sort of malcro straps that

you know ensures okay you're going from point A to point B there's something in between that could you know allow you to cable manage but of course there's always the okay just shove everything in

close the panel type of builder as well because yeah less time spent on you know working on your PC more time spent on enjoying the PC games. You all play games on your PCs?

I hope they do. Next week we're going to have Jules from the customer service team here on the podcast, and he's going to talk about what he sees on a day-to-day basis with the way people build and their PCs. And one of the questions I want to ask him,

I'm going to ask you, because I'm super curious what your take is on this, but I want to know what's one of the most common mistakes you see people make when building inside of an NZXT case? Hmm. I wouldn't say it's mistakes. Well, I mean, yes, back to what I was saying, you know, about, you know, wiring things up and, you know,

going, utilizing more optimal, you know, cutouts to get to that point. Yeah, there's nothing really that sticks out all too much. Mike installed the crack and radiator on the bottom of his case. Is that a mistake or is that good? There's definitely, you know, okay, the biggest mistake is sometimes, you know, you get a fan that's blowing one way, but then because it looks serious. you know, have it oriented.

And then there's never enough intake. It's funny, you mentioned that just the other day, someone posted on our subreddit, shout out to R slash NZXT. Someone posted this diagram of how they set up the airflow in their NZXT case. And literally every single one of our cases

is designed the same way where air goes in through the front and goes out the top in the rear, right? But they decided to do intake and exhaust on the front. So I think it was the bottom was intake, the top was exhaust. And then on the top, they had one intake, one exhaust. The rear was intake. The bottom was one intake, one exhaust. And I guess they're thinking was, you know, they couldn't figure out like where the air goes in and out.

So they just figured, you know, let me just make both, like, every single side go in and out. And I told them. And that's definitely one thing you want to avoid because you get air, cool air in, and then immediately you're pulling it out. What you want is a good amount of airflow going to the critical components, and therefore sort of funneling them towards a path. So intake, ideally in the front, so that you get the most volume, you know, where it's sort of unobstructed

just due to how PCs are positioned. And hopefully you're not blowing hot air at yourself, right? That's like, yeah, I don't know if I want to play games when, you know, hot air is constantly being blown at me.

Maybe it was winter. I don't know. Yeah. You get sweaty enough playing games as it is, right? Yeah. Actually, I get cold hands and feet because all the blood goes. than my brain, so.

Yeah. All right, Kev, what's one feature that you think makes NZT cases stand out from our competitors? I don't know. I think one of the things that sort of sticks out for me is not entirely on the K side, but the moment you take, say, our motherboard design

and put it in the vast C-East, C of motherboards You know ours sticks out because of how clean You know it can be So similarly on the case side You know a lot of times Competitors are sort of putting

Or Putting their take Or implementing some sort of design element that You know, sticks to with their brand Whereas NCXT The way we think about it is, how do we clean, tastefully, sort of put branding from the exterior. Now, yeah, that's something we might need to work better on so that, you know, we don't get stuck in this. This thing just looks boring and, you know, maybe NZXT is too subtle, and therefore nobody knows that it's NZXT.

So there's always a balance to kind of meet. And yeah, it's not always easy. You know, I rely on our designers and, you know, maybe even Johnny for his input, hey, this is not NZXT enough. Yeah. So we all kind of pitch into, you know, how we all think. So I guess, since you're kind of talking about that, like, how do you know, do you know when something is nzxte enough?

Like, when you're making, let's say, like, a case and you're like, okay, you know, the engineering, the cooling's good, but what makes you go, you know, we need to take a step back because it doesn't look NSXT or it doesn't feel NCXN. What, what, or does it's like criteria that you look at? Yeah. I think that's always going to be something that's hard to answer because I would say people, People's, and by people I mean, like, customers and end users, people, PC builders, your perspectives change, right?

And therefore, do they want something with overwhelmingly, you know, like, that just stands out with a brand or logo? Probably more people would say no than yes. unless they're rocking like a, I don't know, an Apple notebook. But even then I've seen, you know, some people cover it up, I don't know. But, you know,

hopefully it's NCSC is a brand that, you know, people grow to love and they would represent or they would rock, you know, on their shirts. But, yeah, at the end of the day, it's sort of finding that balance, you know, What are, I feel like cases are sort of headed down this path of, okay, maybe this thing needs to blend better with the environment, which is, you know, their desktop space or maybe it's like a piece of furniture. You know, we're seeing, you know, companies create stuff that are like wood trims, but, you know, does the grain match well with, you know, everything else that you got?

You know, and we try to balance it so that, you know, whatever we do create, hopefully it's not going to stick out like a sort drum. Like, when you have it, you know, sitting in your desktop environment. And it sort of blends well with what you got. So, yeah, you know, coming back to the question, how NZXT is NCC? It's a tough one. I would say, you know, we won't know unless we see it. and we sort of try to, you know, do these renders in, like, spaces that make sense a lot of times as well to kind of envision and picture, you know, the products in its natural environments.

So, yeah, it's definitely a balance. Since you're mentioning people and how they use cases, I'm curious, Kevin, how does community feedback shape the design of these cases? Yeah, I think today we try to gather as much input as we can maybe even through

like Amazon reviews or customer reviews where they post images of where these cases are ultimately sitting and we try to understand what, I guess who are these PC gamers now

and you know I mean, Iben, I know we're working on something to get more feedback. But, yeah, it requires us to, you know, understand the needs of the community. And, yeah, there's always some good ideas here and there that, you know, we try to test and validate. And that's part of, I guess, the role of a manager as well, right? we make assumptions on where, you know, we think the needs are going to be. And, you know, we validate against those to see if it makes sense. And a lot of times you don't know until, you know, the product is out there.

And, you know, people are either saying, you know, this thing is garbage or, you know, this thing is like the best thing in the world. is there is something that like a customer or like a like a or at least like a survey that has actually like directly influenced a case i mean there's definitely we run surveys and we definitely do take those inputs um on case it's it's a little bit hard um because a lot of the constraints comes from okay this is the layout and and you kind of have to go about it that way

whereas because it's hard to survey something hey this is layout good right or is this going to help your air with your airflow they wouldn't know right but say on like how well something is placed or you know certain shapes you know, those are things that we could

probably survey and get a sense of let's see, uh... Kevin, have you ever been surprised by how someone has used an NXT case? Like, besides um, like having a PC built?

Um, or it could be. Like, for example, like, I think for me, like, uh, one time I saw I started seeing this trend on social media when the H1 came out people were putting it

like laying down horizontally instead of vertically I thought that was kind of cool just curious if you've seen any any unique ways people have used in ZDXD case yeah not not that I've

um no not that I've I've come across um Bear law says that they put their beer on top of it sometimes. That's pretty unique. That's dangerous. Yeah.

Okay, so let's talk a little bit more about the future of NZXT cases. No spoiler alerts here, Kevin. I don't want you to leak anything that we're working on here. That's always like a challenge. In case, Johnny's listening. Yeah. Yeah.

So my first question for you about the future of NZXT cases here. Like, what do you and your team do to make sure that NZT cases are staying compatible with the latest hardware trends? Because I've seen a few comments here in the chat already about these giant graphics cards, you know? Like, what are you doing to make sure

that these cases stay compatible? Not just with GPUs, but everything that's coming out. Yeah, so I guess working in this industry, We do, you know, work with, like, the partners that are, you know, pushing their latest technologies. So, you know, NVIDIA being one of them, AMD Intel, you know, we're always in discussions with them as well. So, you know, we try to get a gauge from their inputs and, you know, make sure that what we're creating is sort of in line with what they are. are expecting. I mean,

there's definitely, in the component space that is like not the graphics card or that's a little bit more challenging because, you know, other brands, they are open to do whatever they like, right? So,

you know, thicker radiators generally aren't something that you know, we sort of designed in. But if that becomes the trend, then that's something we always monitor and keep an eye out for. And it's always about staying on top of what the requirements and the demands are kind of are. You know, if CPUs are getting hotter and, you know, what it takes to cool it down is a bigger radiator than, you know, maybe 420. is the path way forward.

And hence why we sort of made the H7 capable of supporting bigger radiators and having those 3 120 fans along the bottom. Yeah, so as a PM, it is about, what are those inputs that are coming in, whether it's from supplier side, whether it's from all the, you know, all the, you know, competitive products that are available out in the market and sort of having a you know a good sense of where everything is you know in yeah in in in terms of GPU that's that's you know when we when we had the H6 you know we brought it up to you know the graphic cards manufacturers and say hey this is you know something we're considering and you know they they really liked how it um you

how we sort of positioned it. Is there a trend, like, right now that you're really paying attention to more than the others? Like, I know you talked about CPU, you know, graphics card sizes. Is there one or maybe even, like, two of them that you're like, yeah, this will probably affect a lot of our cases in the future? Well, lately, it's been this, I don't know. Like, quality is a bar that we set really highly. on NZXT cases. And lately, I'm just seeing a lot more flimsy stuff out there.

And it's like, do people really not care anymore? And that's always been one thing that, you know, certain YouTube influencers, they do like Ben tests. They take it. They rattle the case and, you know, have been sort of saying, hey, this thing is bad. But nowadays it's like, huh? Is it something that you accept now?

So I don't think we're going down that path because quality is still a bar that we set really highly and we make sure that when you get our product, it should feel rigid and solid. It shouldn't feel like it's going to break once you have it, you know, set. Or, you know, you accidentally drop a panel somewhere and it bends out of shape.

So yeah, hopefully that trend is not the way cases are going. But, yeah, if people are okay with it, and maybe that's where, I guess, dollars could then be put elsewhere. Yeah, as a PM, it's always about balancing where the dollars are kind of put into. and therefore, you know, maybe it becomes, okay, allocated towards finer dust filters or something like that. Are there any big trends or innovations that you foresee in the future for, that would influence?

Well, it's already happening now, which is, you know, the panoride view. There's like five or six cases that looks exactly like the corsairs, you know, 3500. And, you know, following Computex last year, it was the trend. There's also this trend of, you know, enabling displays. So, yeah, people want more displays, apparently. Crack and Elite is not enough. You're not always have more. Yeah.

So if you could design an NZXT case without any limitations, like Johnny just said, Kevin, you have infinite budget here. you can make whatever you want, what would that case look like? Ooh. I guess to answer that, it's, like, I feel like there's definitely

this need to go small, and, you know, components are becoming more and more powerful, you know, squeezing more performance in a smaller package. Maybe it's somewhere along the lines

of, you know, how do we balance it? performance in a smaller you know case and yeah do you I'm not saying I'm not saying there's still definitely huge advantages in having you know big cases where you know air just kind of just flows on through but yeah if performance allows then yeah it's a smaller case that yeah we'll get us there there any like cases that we used to make like our discontinued cases that you wish that we could like I know we for like our for our April Fool's Day last year I think it was for the classic

where we're like hey we're revamping our old cases people were actually really excited about that they're like wait is this real or not because I really hope this is true is there like a case that you're like I would love to just redo again for this current generation at least yeah I mean the phantom lines were sort of iconic in its heydays. And I don't know, something I think

it still comes back to the question of whether it's going to now blend well or not blend well with your environment. I know Ivan, you like the Manta that you have sitting back there. Yeah. It's definitely unique

the way we form sort of the curved panels. But yeah, in terms of performance, that's always going to be tough. Solid panels. So, yeah, how do you have solid panels but ensure airflow, right? And, yeah, or adequate airflow. So, yeah, maybe it's, maybe it is those tradeoffs, giving up on that. And creating something that, you know, is.

going to withstand the test of time, be put into your desktop environment, and, you know, it fits. It's a lot of balancing. Yeah. All right, Kevin, I have one last question for you, and it's the hardest question of the day. And be careful how you answer

in case your boss is watching, right? What is your favorite part about working at NZXT, besides being on this podcast? I'd say it's, you know, the culture of, you know, everybody who's involved, all of the teams, you know. Even Lorette? Oh, 100%, maybe 110%. Okay. Yeah.

I mean, it's definitely a privilege to be part of this team that, you know, everyone sort of speaks their mind in the sense that it is, you know, better for, you know, it allows us to sort of all learn and grow from each other and, you know, be part of a team that, you know, cares a lot about what we create and, you know, sort of the interactions that we think is, you know, great for the community. And, yeah, again, inputs can come from, you know, all over the place. And, yeah, I mean, that's certainly one. thing that I appreciated. I mean, even like working out in Taiwan, that sort of culture is non-existent in

companies out there. So, yeah, it's definitely been a blessing. Well, that was a great answer. So that was my last question, but I do have some community questions for you, taken from the chat here during the stream. Sage, the plug, wants to know how far away are we from a pyramid case? Because he says, or they say,

a pyramid is the strongest shape and structure. And by the way, Kevin, I don't know if you saw this, but they just discovered like these giant... Oh, yeah, pillars. Pillars underneath the... Pyramid. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So who knows what the heck was going on right there?

But, yeah, so I guess how far are we from seeing a pyramid case? So a case has to abide by this sort of ATX form factor that Intel put out years ago. And therefore, anything in the PC space, unfortunately, the layout, the motherboard is going to be where everything connects to. And that is, you know, in itself, a porn factor. and then I guess the pyramid shape it takes up a lot of space especially on the bottom so I guess to squeeze everything in

I don't know maybe there's there's some I just Googled it there is a pyramid PC case I think I recall maybe from Thermotake or something Asa as a Asa okay Mike should Google it and put it up There you go yeah that looks pretty cool Yeah so this is more

like an open bench slash. You got the, yeah, so it apparently exists already. So there we go. Sage, the plug, had a second question. Why can the H7 run a 420 millimeter AIO vertically, but the H9 can't at all? Yeah, so that goes to, that's definitely the thing about our timeline of introduction of cases.

It is generally the case that when we are set out to do a particular case, that new breakthrough carries over to the next one. But then H9 sort of came ahead of all of these transitions and requirements, and therefore in the refresh cycle, it, you know, didn't have it when we set out to do that product. So, you know, it's about the learnings and takeaways. But yeah, it's a good question. You know, it's something that we work towards.

Mike actually feels like that in his personal life. He feels, this old man feels like he was born too late. He's 20 years younger than me and he's 20 years older for some reason. Epidemic 006 wants to know which case. is recommended for the first-time PC builder? Yeah, I would say the H-5 is a good one. I remember when the H-500 was, it was sort of the primary case in the market.

It was sort of recommended to, you know, if you need to build a PC for your grandma, that's the case to get. Any PC will be fine with that case. And then the new H-5 is not. I'm imagining my grandma playing Fortnite. That'd be something. Cassive 7 wants to know,

is there a case that best, that's best for the new 50 series cards? That's best. I think you can't go wrong with any of our cases, but today we pretty much allow, you know, bottom-mounted fans, you know, to be on the intake side. So depending on your 50s,

series card, if it's extra long, you know, maybe you want to consider going like either the H7 or the H9, which has more fan capacities along the floor. So, yeah, if your 50, you know, 90 is more or less just the Founders Edition lengths, then, yeah, something like an H6 would do just fine. Yeah, and it comes back to your desktop space. do you have space for dual chamber and what you can allocate there? Victor Vaughn,

aka MF Doom, wants to know, what case can you recommend that as small as possible while I can fit a 280 millimeter radiator on top with fans on both sides? Yeah, I know when we made the latest H-5, we allowed for 2-140 fans

to be mounted on top, And we stated that, you know, if you've had low profile memory, you could fit a 280 up on top. But who buys low profile memories? Yeah, that's going to be hard to come by. So, yeah, unfortunately, today we don't have a great case that, I mean, you can buy an H7. That's, you know, 280 top mounted, but. You know what the correct answer for that is, Kevin? What is that you?

The Manta. The Manta can do that. That's why I love the Manta so much. The Manta to me was ahead of its time, man, because it can actually do things that a much bigger case cannot. This is a perfect example of that. It's the only case that I know of that's Mini-ItX that can support a 280-millimeter radiator on front and top

with push-pull configuration. And it's not that big. Yeah, the only problem with that one is now you're limited with a two-slot GPU, right? It's true. Nowadays, everything is at least. The GPUs are a lot,

a lot bigger. Yeah. All right. Last community question of the day is from the only boiled tater. Open concept wall-mount case when? Do you think we'll ever make one,

Kevin, a wall-mount case? I think that's such a niche market to tackle that it's going to be hard because in thinking about walls and in thinking about environments, that's certainly not

yeah, that we've considered primary. I don't know if... Everyone in the chat, everyone in the chat is begging you to do it. Wall Mount, please, please, L-O-L. Do it, do it. I will definitely run it by the team and see

you know what's possible I don't trust myself enough to hang anything on my walls let alone a computer I get scared mounting my TV to the wall like I get scared about that like a TV or like a $3,000, $4,000

PC or something like that that's terrifying yeah yeah just thinking about the cable management running cables too you know everything would really have to be wireless yeah all right well it's not time for my favorite part of the show.

It's where Mike asks you the stupidest questions he can think of. Oh, man. Mike, take it away, please. All righty. So we'll stick with NSXT for a little bit. So what's something that you wish people knew more about NZXC cases?

Thanks for the crickets. Now I can't even think. I don't know, I think the team works hard, putting what we put in the time and effort to, you know, creates a lot of these products. And we do hope that, you know, you do appreciate, you know, all the design choices that we've come to make.

And if it was a bad design choices, we'd be happy to hear it. Yeah, so definitely, you know, give us your feedback, give us your inputs. What's the most difficult part of your job? I think it's the, maybe it's the creative aspect of some of the choices that we have to make. Because those don't come easy and it's not like you could have a quick answer to, you know, any of it. Sometimes it takes time to cook. And, you know, it really requires, you know, a lot of brainpower to be, I guess, put towards a particular thought or designed.

Yeah, so definitely not overnight. Let's see. What games are you playing right now? Oof. You know, there's been this, like, lull, you know, in terms of game really. I know Monster Hunter Wild just came out, but you know, I played world. I haven't found time to, you know, play any of the latest game. So lately I've been jumping into older titles.

So for a while I was playing Red Dead Red Dead Redemption to Elder Scrolls online because, you know, it scratches the MMO-I-H, I guess. And then there's this like indie game. that's like Travelers Rest or something where you manage a, like a tavern. So, yeah, those are what I've been playing lately. Is there a game that you'd recommend everyone to play? Hmm. I don't know. I think everyone, you know, probably, you know, I'm not fired up Marvel rivals yet.

But I don't know. I've been hearing good things about it. I was never really into Overwatch, but I don't know. maybe that's a game I would try, but not, it's not my recommendation. I'm just saying, hey, maybe it's something. I would trust

Steam charts. If people are playing it, maybe it's good. As someone that has been playing it, it is good. All right. If you can play single or multiplayer for the rest of your life, you can only choose one. Which one would you choose? I'd say multiplayer,

because the dynamic is just, you know, so different. Single player, you're kind of limited to what the developers and, you know, what the creators kind of give you. And then, you know, I'm into sandbox games. So, you know, games like Minecraft and shrouded, you know, any of those sandbox games are always good to play with friends. if you have $1 million, you have to live in the game for a year.

But if you die in the game, you're dead in real life. Which one are you going to choose? It definitely has got to be an easy game, right? Up to you? I mean, you've got to live in it for a year. So if you really want to live in, like, Animal Crossing, you totally can, but you're sucking it for a year. Maybe travel's rest.

Yeah. What did you say? I was going to say, just say, Among Us. Among us? Oh, my God. No, I can't be stuck fixing things. Maybe like what I, the game that I talked about earlier, Travelers Rest, where you're like, you own a tavern,

you expand the tavern, and it's like running a restaurant. I got to play the, I love games like that. I got to check it out. Yeah, it was on sale, I guess, a couple of weeks back. I don't know if it's still. Oh, it looks like Star Dove. Yeah, exactly. It's like Star Doar D.

It would be a game that I would choose probably. I just won't go to the minds. That's a good one. If your life were a video game, which cheat code would you like to have? Dang. Like, who uses cheat codes anymore? Could it be us?

I've never cheated on a video game. I mean, I only remember, like, back when age of empires and entering cheat codes was a, the thing or like Starcraft Yeah I don't I don't

I guess those cheat codes that give you like infinite amount of resources right Or like you constantly You enter it as for more Yeah GTA or Pokemon is what I was thinking Pokemon I used to

I'm sorry Was it GTA had cheat codes Oh yeah Oh yeah Oh my God Yeah why did I not know of this Okay

Oh yeah that was like That was the most fun time was when you were in GTA, you're just like, I'm just going to... Oh, yes. But that was like the 2D ones, though, right? Not like the latest time. No, there's a... I'm not sure about five, but I remember in San Andreas, you could.

Definitely. Yeah, you could put on like rocket launchers and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, you have to, like, up down, left, right, or whatever. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

Hmm. Yeah, those were fun days. Speaking of that, so a genie gives you three wishes. which what are what are those three wishes like anything anything you can do anything and I'll say to be nice we'll do no

genie you know twisting of any kind you know no no more wishes that's not allowed and you can't wish for the rule to not exist

these are always hard yeah these are always hard because times change yeah maybe Genie can't like ensure health, right? That's possible.

Okay. And yeah, I guess health. I guess given my age, I feel like, you know, something to watch out for. But you never know. Maybe like a force feel that's always like,

you know, protecting, you know, my family or whatever. You know, lately I've been watching solo leveling. Oh yeah Those Those are pretty cool Become a necromancer

I guess This is a philosophical And I know some people I know there's been questions About this recently Do you put away your shopping cart When you're done with it Oh

You mean like if I go to Costco Yeah Do you put it back at the little like shopping cart like I would say 95% of the time sometimes like they just don't have anything like remotely accessible

and you have to like go 100 yards back to return it then I make sure that it is like maybe put up on like an island where you know no car would get to yeah

I tend to make sure that it doesn't impact. Okay. Yeah. Some other one that's somebody else that's parking in the lot. Ivan, do you put away your shopping cart? Always. I'm my type of person that even picks up trash from the floor, man.

Like I don't like, I don't like litter bugs or people that don't put their cart back, especially at Costco. You know, Costco is like, it's always a mission. to get in out of that parking lot and you know it really grants my gears when people just leave their carts everywhere okay I got some

would you rather is real quick so we'll go through these real quick you cannot walk crawl or anything like that you can only hop or you have to sprint which one would you rather choose sprint

you just just try to go to the get some waters of like like that you get to sprint over but I think I would do sprinting too because I think hopping would be really annoying to deal with yeah if you if stairs you got it you got to sprint up the stairs you know if you got to hop it up too uh let's see would you rather have super super slow internet like you're basically buffering a YouTube video or your phone battery is always low no matter how

much you charge. Phone battery. I agree. Yeah. I think I could deal without the phone. I can't deal with the PC doing that. That would be awesome. Even at low battery and a phone,

you could, and fast internet, you could still find something out really quick. Would you rather never have to sleep again or never have to use the bathroom again? Oh, wow. Never have to. I saw it on the Reddit for him, and I was like, oh, wait, that's a good direction.

I mean, if you never have to use the bathroom, you continuously eat whatever you want. Yeah, it just like disappears, you know. It's just like you don't have to basically use the restroom. I mean, I love sleeping. So, yeah, it's, if I don't have to use bathroom, yeah. That's the issue because people say, yeah, sleep saves a lot of time. But the issue is if you never have to sleep again, that's a lot of time to do stuff. Yeah.

You're going to be cool. All right. I'll make it even harder, though. what if by never having to use the bathroom again, you will always have that sensation that you have to go. Oh, that's awful. That is awful. And I guess if you never have to sleep, you'll always be sleep.

You'll always do that. You always get that tired thing, but you never have to. Oh, the side effects. I hate the side effects. I think I would rather, I personally, I think I would rather just feel that P sensation. man because I don't think I don't think I can feel like I'm about to just

I can't operate like that I think I can deal with me tired right I think I'd rather be tired than feel like you always have to pee your poop because that would be awful yeah people say yeah like what Kiva said Chaz like I already have chronic fatigue to say nothing

yeah like on yeah Lauren says you're on edge during every meeting. Yeah, that's something awful. That was really stuck, actually. God, I hate the little side effects that you added on. It made it way worse.

I was like, oh, I don't want this anymore. I just rather be normal at this point. Yeah. Let's see. Oh, would you rather get a toenail ripped off or pass a kidney stone? Honestly, I don't know the sensation for either of these. I mean, I just know that both hurts like hell.

Yeah. Yeah. The kidney's done in particular is supposed to be more painful than childbirth apparently. Right. That's what, yeah, but you don't know until, because everyone's perception of pain is different as well, right? Everyone's, yeah, everyone's pain is for, you know, if you're, if you're one of those people that can just, like, you know, get hit and you're like a boxer, you know, you're like, oh, I. I can take it. Cases 7 in the chat.

They say they've had both. Trust me, take the toenail. In fact, take all 10. Oh, my God. Take 10 toenails versus one kidney stone? That's how bad it was? Oh, my God. Right?

Well, I'll take your word for it. Because I think toenail is like immediately. And then after a while, your body gets used to. Maybe you like wrap it up or something. So yeah, toenail. Makes sense. Oh my gosh. Yeah.

Yes, 100%. I dropped my knees in pain with that kidney stone. Oh. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Okay.

And then would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses? 100 duck-sized horses. Duc-sized horse. Holy crap. No, it's 100 duck-sized horses. What's your plan then? You have no weapons. It's just you.

Yeah, how do you do that? Well, I was thinking about the, like, the size of the mouth, right? A horse-sized duck has a big-ass mouth. Yeah. How do you fend that off? That's true. And they're vicious, too. The ducks are vicious.

Right, right. Because that beak is going to be maybe the size of your torso, versus say a hundred duck-sized horses your knee right and then their mouth aren't like this tiny right

so yeah all right I think that's all the rapifier community questions our own interview questions I think I'll go into announcements but do we have anything

before we go to the announcements I just want to thank Kevin for joining us on the second episode of the NZXT case-a-thon. I also want to thank everyone who tuned in live except for DJ Illogic. They were a little distracting there in the chat. They kept typing.

Just kidding, Lauren. Love you, man. I also wanted to thank all the people from the NSXD Club who tuned in those poochie points. Yeah, thanks for having me, and thanks everybody for tuning in. Yeah. All right, let me get some announcements.

I know people were here for the, for the coach. A special code that gives a hundred or 500 extra entries. So I'll go ahead and do the announcements and I give you that code. So first, like we talked about for our caseathon, we have some cases on sale. You guys can take a look at nzc.co slash Amazon to check out all these cases. And we also have other things on sale as well. So take a look on our Amazon page.

You get all the details of our caseathon on our blog. So nzxc.com. slash blog if you guys want to take a look at every single thing any single update we're doing any future events like we have for next week we have jewels coming on next week so keep a look on to blog and we'll keep that updated as possible uh like i haven said you can see in the chat right there from harbour quests people are getting poochie points if you guys want to join our club you guys can get poochie points for doing some quests you know just by joining in on the twitch stream liking certain things on our social platforms and he used those poochy points to get prizes i actually just shipped out a bunch

of prices from like cases and peripherals and poachy plushes and i've been sending out steam gift cards we're giving out so much stuff it's free stuff for just participating so join the club nc60 dot co slash club or estimation point club in the chat um make sure to follow at nz60 on social media platforms uh and also if you guys have anything any questions or any sort of concerns or maybe even have anything any opinions about our caseathon you can email podcast at ncc.com yes Zelda is chilling right here she's starting to get a little annoyed when I do my announcements um I think that's it I haven't doing anything before I give out the code to all the people here I just want to thank Kevin again it was a pleasure yep

Alrighty. So we are doing a giveaway for three winners. We'll get some of the, uh, be patient. Be patient. AG, I'm getting to that. I'm getting to it. So we're giving away three cases. We'll pull out the winner later today. We'll email you. Check the emails. So you can see who wins. Uh, and you guys can win a case of any of your choice or color, depending on what we have in stock to. But the code for that is, is, you know, I'm going to make you guys wait even longer now because, you know, it's like, it's like a teacher does it. I'm going to make you waste, wait five seconds. Okay, I'm impatient too. All right. The code is just in case. Just in case.

That is the code for 500 extra entries. Towers our way saying thank you guys for joining us live. Thank you, Kevin, for joining us and giving you so many insights. I saw some people in the comments saying, like, this is actually really cool to learn. So thank you for joining us. Thank you, Kevin. And thank you all for joining us live and tuning in on our N60 Twitch at 10 a.m. Pacific Times on Fridays.

And don't forget to listen to the previous episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and SoundCloud. A guiding question for us, send an email to at our podcast at nccc.com or tag at N60 on social media platforms. Thank you, Kevin. Thank you, Kevin. Thank you, Zelda. And thank you everyone for joining us. See you next time. And have a safe weekend.

Bye, everyone. Bye.