Performance
The H440 isn't blessed with huge mesh openings, and it has additional sound-deadening materials to contend with, however the quartet of pre-installed 120mm fans appear to be providing a reasonable amount of airflow. Our Core i5-3570K, overclocked to 4.4GHz, didn't run into any visible trouble during a Prime95 stress test.
GPU cooling performance, however, isn't quite so good. An under-load temperature of 82ºC in a CrossFire setup is no cause for concern, mind, but other cases are better equipped when it comes to out-the-box cooling for high-end graphics. What the H440 needs to do in order to impress from a performance perspective, we feel, is to run extremely quietly...
...but that isn't the case. Despite the sound-deadening materials, fan noise when idle or under load is noticeably higher than expected. This is because the chassis' four three-pin fans are attached to a Molex-powered hub that doesn't regulate speed. Disconnecting the fan hub altogether during testing made the H440 one of the quietest chassis we've tested, and repeating an earlier point, it's a real shame NZXT hasn't incorporated a fan-speed controller as standard.