Excellent cooling for only $60, but light on
features
With its faux-aluminium drive bay blanking
plates and modest looks, NZXT has made sure the Source 210 doesn’t fall foul of
mesh overload, while keeping the plastic trim to a minimum. The result is a
smart-looking chassis that’s also deceptively well-equipped considering its
sub-$64 price tag.
NZXT
Source 210 Elite
The front panel at the top of the front
fascia packs a single USB 3 and USB 2 port with the usual headphone and
microphone jacks, and the fascia is removable if you want to access the pair of
120mm fan mounts behind it. There’s also a pair of 120/140mm mounts in the
roof, a rear 120mm mount, a 120mm floor mount and a 120/140mm side panel mount.
The Source 210 mounts two cooling fans as exhausts,
with a rear 120mm fan and roof 140mm fan included. Pleasingly, the cables for
these fans are also pre-routed behind the motherboard and fitted with both
3-pin and Molex connectors, helping to keep the interior tidy.
There’s
also a pair of 120/140mm mounts in the roof, a rear 120mm mount, a 120mm floor
mount and a 120/140mm side panel mount.
While there’s plenty of fan mounts, the
Source 210 has no dust filters. Without filters, the inside of your case and
PSU can soon become coated in muck, so their complete omission is a
disappointment.
Inside, the Source 210 sports a large 3.5in
hard disk cage capable of housing up to eight 3.5in drives using tool-free
fittings. However, the tool-free clips are decidedly unconvincing, and only
eight clips are included. There’s no 2.5in mount either, so an SSD will require
a 2.5in-to-3.5in adaptor. Cable routeing is good, though, with four cut-outs
around the motherboard, and the front-panel cables pre-routed behind the
motherboard tray. As with many cases on test, though, the hole for the 8-pin
EPS12V cable wasn’t big enough, so you’ll probably need to route this through
the CPU cut-out instead.
Inside,
the Source 210 sports a large 3.5in hard disk cage capable of housing up to
eight 3.5in drives using tool-free fittings.
With no dust filters to obstruct airflow,
and a pair of fans close to the core hardware, the Source 210 offers impressive
cooling, with a CPU delta T of 48°C matching the Fractal Core 3000 and Antec
One, while its GPU delta T of 35°C was also among the best. Adding our two
extra 120mm fans only dropped the CPU and GPU delta Ts by 1°C though. Clearly,
the Source 210’s stock fans are close to its ideal cooling setup, and were
reasonably quiet too.
Conclusion
The NZXT Source 210 delivers excellent
cooling and stylish looks at a rock-bottom price, but its lack of dust filters
and a dedicated 2.5in drive mount are hard to ignore. We recommend spending an
extra $15 on the better-equipped Fractal Design Core 3000 or Xigmatek Midgard
II instead.
