NZXT H2 Silent Classic Construction
The case is made of black-painted steel (interior also painted black) with a traditional matte paint job on the top and sides. Since it’s a silent case there is no window and the interior side panels 
are lined with sound-absorbing foam that do a good job to mask some of the internal fan sounds. The side panels are also of a sturdy construction keeping them mostly rigid and assisting in sound dampening.
The front is a sturdy plastic with a left-opening door that is also plastic but with a faux brushed aluminum door panel. Opening the door reveals the two front 120-mm fans and the three 5.25" drive bay accesses. A small white LED at the lower right shines through the door giving it a gently-illuminated right corner. The NZXT logo is present on the front foot of the machine on the left, at the opening for the air flow channel. The lower air flow channel also features a micro-filter screen to keep the air going in free of most dust bunnies and debris.
The back panel has the USB 3.0 pass through cable to connect to your system board or to an add-on card. Along with the other standards is a dual tube liquid-cooling pass through so if you want a quiet rig with liquid-cooling you’ve got the potential for that.
Internally the NZXT H2 is set to house eight drives as well as the three aforementioned 5.25" drive bays, all tool-less. The 5.25" drives feature an interesting spring-lock combination mount where the bracket can be locked into place with a slide lock but can also be removed completely without a single tool being needed. The opposite side of the drive bay has no locks, just a series of pressure-brackets that will see you wedge your drive into them and then lock into place with the right side tool-less spring-lock brackets. You might also fit a screw into that side if you like. For a silent chassis I expected some sort of padding between the optical drive and the bay but this is not the case and so an optical drive is able to generate some vibrational noise that can be resonated through the case into the environment.
The 3.5/2.5 inch bays feature tool-less, slide-out drawers with pegs to mount your drives. This is a fairly standard feature on a lot of chassis these days and these actually have pegs on both sides to secure the drives. Don’t want that 10,000 RPM hard drive flying off and taking out your graphics card, now do you? (I’m joking, it won’t really of course)
Now I dug up an older Turbo-cool SLI-ready power supply to test the silencing effectiveness of the NZXT H2 and with the side off there is a fairly distinguishable hum coming from the PS, you can almost hear the bearings in the fan. The good thing is that they included rubber pads on the power supply mount area, so that hum and vibration are not transmitted to the case. Putting the side panel back on the right took a fair amount of noise away even from a far-from-silent power supply. With a brand new one it would certainly be quiet runnings.
NZXT H2 Silent Classic Installation
Since I really needed my gaming rig so I could get some reviews finished (and some gaming time in after two weeks without it because of moving) I dove right in. Such eagerness can generally result in a careless or sloppy movement from time to time and that can often lead to a sliced finger. NZXT seems to have thought about that as there are no sharp edges on the case. Even the corners of the side panels are folded over to give a rounded edge and many of the internal areas are very similar. If you’ve installed a lot of components in your life you’ve undoubtedly cut your fingers on something or other. With the NZXT H2 Classic, it would be difficult to do that, which is not a documented feature, but was certainly worth noting.
