Gadgetory

hey everyone this is Steve from gamers Nexus dotnet and today we're looking at NZXT is high-end behemoth gaming case the phantom 820 this is considered an enthusiast great case and is equipped with a mountain of features including plenty of cooling and cable management options as such it is unwieldy and quite heavy and there's no way to put this lightly 250 bucks so the case builds upon a lot of high-end elements that will continue to pave the way for future case design in my opinion whether or not it is in your price range I would highly recommend learning more about this case so you can see where the industry is headed now as for the features due to the sheer amount of features that it ships with where we're going to change out the format of it and look first at the offerings of the case and then delve into my experiences building the system and its performance in our lab and thoughts on whether it's worthwhile and all that the first thing you'll notice is that it's a monster case it measures nine point two inches wide twenty five point six inches tall and twenty four point one inches deep so it's gargantuan better yet it weighs in at 32 pounds pre-build and is quite a bit heavier once you've stocked it with all of your GPUs and heat sinks and what-have-you as for basic specs the case ships with a top mounted 200 millimeter fan front 200 millimeter fan side 140 millimeter fan and rear 140 millimeter fan the case is pre-configured to have front and side intake with rear and top exhaust so it's a standard push-pull configuration and as for additional fans there's room for five more fans depending on how large you go for instance you could opt for either two 200 millimeter fans or three 120 millimeter fans on the top depending on what you're going for and there's all kinds of radiator room in there as well you can fit a total of a 280 or three sixty millimeter radiator for the top and 240 or 280 millimeter radiator for the bottom and there's 90 millimeters of internal top space for that top radiator so that's quite a bit of liquid cooling that you can do past the fans we see that there are 10 I think I counted that right 10 grommeted cable routing holes for cable management and that's basically one hole for cable it's it's almost like someone got a little too happy with the hole punch because there's almost nowhere in the sidewall that kit that you can't route a cable this is a good thing they've also scattered cable tie anchors throughout the case so you can easily bundle cable clusters and anchor them to something so it's not just floating around in space the case can host EA TX XL ATX ATX micro ATX and if you don't want to look like you're overcompensating for anything you could even put a mini ITX motherboard in there so I almost want to build an APU enabled mini ITX system just if only for laughs but moving from that we have the mounting rails for the drives which are all completely tool lists for both internal and external drive bays and the bottom drive bay Kage is completely removable from the case if you end up not needing it the case is primarily composed of steel and plastic and for the most part feels like relatively solid construction I do have a few complaints about build quality but we'll get to those in a moment with the rest of my opinions and one of the more fun elements of the phantom 820 that I want to mention is its hue LED controller which is a light version a li te version of NZXT LED lighting system and it allows for full control of a few pre-mounted LEDs on the front panel and an LED strip on the interior of the case spinning the dial allows on-the-fly color changing for dozens of colors I think I forget I counted somewhere around 70 or more colors plus or minus 10 it's quite hard to count because they were very very minor differences between them which is good if you want a lot of color options one thing I noticed that is that the color seemed quite vibrant for LEDs contrary to a lot of more dull options out there you notice a lot of cases with red LEDs for example or a little less vibrant than other wavelengths when I asked NZXT about why there seems so vibrant they confirmed that their controllers unique hardware allows for better LED control and maximizes intensity across the spectrum better in that same grain there's a rear i/o light panel that makes cable swapping a bit less swearing intensive when it's dark and the front panel of the case has four USB to ports two USB 3 ports standard analog audio ports a fan controller power state buttons and an SD card slot which will unfortunately not allow the front lid to close when an SD card is mounted but that's just a design flaw for the larger SD cards like mine the fan controller is four channels and offers a wide range of speeds including full off and full blast there are also several in-between speeds that offer greater cooling at relatively low noise levels and that's a lot of features so I'm sure I'm forgetting something here but I think you get the gist of this case it's basically everything all the things are included so they even actually pre manage the front panel cables and include an EPS v 12 or 12 V's excuse me extender for your PSU so if your cable is too short because it is quite a large case then you can just plug it into a really nice cable extender from there premium cables kit so there's that lots of pampering on that end the build itself let's let's talk about this so I'll first say that this was one of the easiest most satisfying builds I've ever actually completed it was fast and mostly painless and looked incredibly clean at the end of it it was it was very easy to cable manage everything incredibly easy the cable management is thorough and straightforward and the performance numbers have been solid in our testing you can find our full benchmarks in the full review that's linked in the description below if you'd like to see the performance against other cases as for construction quality things are generally solid the exception here is the poor ish quality of the external drive mounting clips I found they were a bit flimsy as were the hard drive cages mounting an optical drive in this case would be quicker with a simple thumb screw than the plastic key brackets that are featured internally and they were they were loose and they were challenging to align properly I actually had the drive become loose several times during the build because I mount drives first for cable management purposes the issue was eventually resolved but took far more frustration than necessary as for drive bay cages or for hard drives they felt intentionally lightweight almost as if NZXT wanted to shed a few ounces from the case and connecting cables to the drive seems to push them in an extra quarter inch too far which meant I had to remount them after they were cabled not a huge deal but something to note the actual assembly was exceedingly easy despite these issues and cable management is almost mindless and there's enough room where you won't be cutting your hands to ribbons while screwing around with heat sinks so there's a feature for you not bleeding is a feature that is only available in large cases evidently I'm not bitter on a similarly good cable management note the phantom 820 has a large amount of space within its right side panel which is bezel to allow even fatter cables and can accommodate up to one point four inches of cabling that's pretty impressive and a massive plus to the case we ran a lot of performance tests on the case most of which are published in the review but one thing I wanted to note in this video is that the additional fans had had kind of slightly unexpected results so I want to elaborate on those after adding an additional 200 millimeter fan to the top exhaust port I found that the temperatures of the CPU actually increased by 3 Celsius which was substantial enough to be disconcerting our airflow analysis seems to demonstrate that the added exhaust fan is interacting negatively with the CPU cooler and creating a dead zone of air where it's competing with the CPU fan for air and that is partially due to the - Niek tower 120 we have and it's it's basically sucking air in from the front of the case and the CPU cooler that is it sucks air from the front and shoots it toward the back however adding an additional bottom mounted fan improved the GPU temperatures by a massive 7 degrees Celsius and that is with a with a standard Aero cool fan I forget the RPM but it was around 1,100 rpm I think so quite massive and very noticeable if you're thinking of adding an extra fan make it the 140 millimeter bottom fan not the top fan as that was actually detrimental to air flow I also ran tests of the fan speed controller multiple configurations and found the lowest settings were often powerful enough to keep things cool and running low intensity games while maintaining a relatively low decibel level and disabling all the case fans was surprisingly acceptable and I was able to rely upon component cooling for performing non intensive tasks now overall to wrap things up I've been pleased with the phantom 820 there aren't a lot of competitors for enthusiasts in this price range due to the the lower volume shipping so the best-known alternative is probably Corsairs 800 d which is priced slightly higher and it has an entirely different aesthetic so so that will vary your mileage will vary based on what you're looking for I truly believe that cases like the Obsidian 800 d and phantom 820 and other high-end cases are really paving the way for gaming enthusiasts and as more enclosures hit the market in this price range we'll hopefully see competition drive down MSRP to a point where they become a tiny bit more mainstream not a whole lot though of course like quite a lot of features so it can't come down that far I feel like the 250 price point for the Phantom is fair but I don't think it's necessarily worth it for most gamers if it ever drops to 200 though I would expect to see it flying off the shelves because it is quite a good case it's just that that 250 is mentally a lot harder to swallow than $199 for example it's a fantastic enclosure excuse me Wow with a few small mechanical issues as for my verdict if you can't quite afford the Phantom 820 but you like what you see consider the third version - Corsair 650d 1/2 X or fractal are in the lower mid-range if you want to spend less than 100 bucks rows wells are 5 and Corsairs 200 are are still some of the best options we've worked with and enthusiasts of course have little reason not to pick up a phantom 820 and once it drops a couple of bucks I think it should be on everyone's radar in the least that's it for this time leave a comment on our review if you have any questions at all and I'll see you all next time peace