There have been complaints for several months now that one of the products of the PC case NZXT exists set on fire. This week, the company finally apologized and removed the case from its store.
The issues pertain to their H1 case, which is basically a very large Xbox Series X-like box. As OC3D reports, “the screws on the H1’s PCIe Riser card appear to be causing a short circuit, causing sparks to fly, smoke and fire on the H1’s PCIe board.”
One owner managed to film the short circuit, complete with subsequent flames.
After initially failing to address the issue when it was reported last year, NZXT proposed a half-baked solution involving the replacement of metal screws for a pair of nylon screws, eventually – mostly thanks to increasing pressure from PC hardware sites – issued a statement on their company’s site and took more concrete steps to correct it.
The statement reads (emphasizes mine):
To our community,
We’m sorry.
The nylon screws were not the complete solution to the H1 fire hazard; they did not address the cause of the case. We did not take into account scenarios in which someone could unknowingly replace the nylon screws with metals. Our execution did not meet the quality our community expected of us.
We will use the H1 of the NZXT Store and NZXT BLD. We are going to send out redesigned PCIe Gen3 Riser assemblies for current H1s and we will help with the installation for those who need them.
In the future, we will introduce more robust and thorough design processes. From initial design, QA, to additional testing, we are committed to quality in both our products and our response to your problems.
We want to thank Steve from Gamers Nexus. He and his team brought the issue of someone replacing the nylon screws with metal screws to our attention and created the urgency surrounding it.