For several months there have been complaints that one of NZXT’s products has been unveiled catching fire. This week, the company finally apologized and took the case out of the store.
The problems were with their H1 case, which is essentially a very large box, similar to the X Series Xbox. As OC3D the report, “it appears that the screws on the H1 Riser PCIe card are causing a short circuit, causing sparks, noise to be generated and burning on the H1 Riser PCIe card.”
One owner managed to film the unfolding short circuit, complete with the flames that followed.
After initially failing to address the issue when it was first reported last year, then proposing a half-way solution that involved replacing some metal screws with some nylon, NZXT finally issued – mainly due to increasing pressure on Computer hardware sites – a statement on their company’s website and took more concrete steps to do so correctly.
This statement reads (my emphasis):
For our community,
We’re sorry.
Nylon screws were not the complete solution to the H1 fire hazard; they did not address the root cause of the problem. I did not consider the scenarios in which someone could replace the nylon screws with the metal ones without knowing it. Our execution did not live up to the quality that our community came to expect from us.
We will remove H1 from NZXT store and NZXT BLD. We will send redesigned PCIe Gen3 Riser assemblies for current H1s and help install for those who need it.
In the future, we will establish more robust and detailed design processes. From initial projects, QA, to additional tests, we are committed to providing quality to both our products and our response to your concerns.
We want to thank Steve from Gamers Nexus. He and his team brought to our attention the problem of someone replacing nylon screws with metal screws and raised the urgency around him.