We introduced the S340, a great budget premium option for entry level builds or seasoned veterans alike, last September to great acclaim. Though the case is positioned as a budget case, we made sure to focus on practicality and quality in the case’s design. The most practical feature of the S340 is the cable management bar. The bar is designed to enable grommet-less cable management, reducing the frustration of making your build tidy and delivering a kick of style to the interior of the case. Today we’ll be building a PC inside our newest iteration of the S340, the S340 Blue. Our CAM team will be using this system as one of their AMD test benches for QA.
The specs:
Case: NZXT S340 Blue
Power: NZXT HALE90 v2 1000W
Cooling: NZXT Kraken X31
CPU: AMD FX8370E
RAM: 4GB x 2 Kingston 1600
GPU: EVGA Geforce GTX 750Ti
Storage: Crucial MX100 512GB
The first thing I noticed about the board was some of the ports were positioned a little awkwardly. Especially the USB 3.0 being located in the back, and the fan connectors were also in the middle of nowhere. Putting in the CPU was fairly simple but comparing to Intel CPU and motherboards, I had to be careful not to bend the pins since AMD is still using this particular design. Installing the stock cooler was a matter of hooking up the latches and clipping it in.
Ram installation is straightforward.
Once the CPU and RAM are installed, it’s time to move the motherboard into the case. The case comes preinstalled with a standoff pin towards the center where it can be used to hold the board in place making things easy to screw in. Once the motherboard was in, we could snap the GPU into its socket easily and hold it in with the thumbscrews in the back. 
The S340 features the two SSD mounts on the PSU shroud, which we used to hold the Crucial M4. It’s secured with 4 screws on the bottom and slides into place while a thumbscrew holds it still. Now it’s time to hook up the cables. We first connected the top panel I/O to the motherboard. Since the HALE90 series is a modular power supply, we could choose only the necessary cables and pull them through the cutouts ahead of connecting them to the power supply. The power supply has its own mounting bracket and slides into the case like a drawer. Because the S340 is pretty compact, we connected the cables before sliding the PSU into the chassis.
Finally, here is where the fun began and it’s time for the cable management bar to shine. I like to begin by starting up from the top and working my way down when working with cable management. Thankfully the S340 comes with quite a few cable tie points to work with. Beginning with the top right side where the CPU power and some fans are generally routed, and surprisingly with this motherboard, the USB 3.0. From there, I work my way tying things up towards the cable management bar. 
The bar allows me to hide the bulky 24-pin motherboard power extremely well along with some of the top I/O cables. Luckily with this build spec, there wasn’t very many cables hide but you can see clearly how much more room was still left from this build in the back. In the front, everything looks even cleaner. All the unsightly cables seem to disappear with only a few left to be seen.
To finish the build off, I was given a Kraken X31 to make things prettier and to make sure this system holds up for years to come. This meant for me to take off the existing cooler and swapping the Kraken in. I ended up installing it in a pull setup with the fans blowing out to the rear. Thankfully, this motherboard included the back bracket to go with it as I heard from my colleagues that this wasn’t something some AMD boards included. 
Once installed, there were a few new cables that were introduced so I had to redo some of the cable ties but because they were routed really nicely, it was fairly simple to come by. If you look, you’ll see how much space is still left behind the bar for more cables. The cable management bar really does a great job hiding all the cables away while making the rear panel easy to close off. Here is the final shot of the finished build and it is now ready for OS installation.
