Gadgetory

we haven't had a break reviewing cases since we got back from CES it's been one after another with the MDX amantha into the Corsair 400 sea and today we're looking at fantex new Eclipse P 400 mid tower enclosure we've been name-dropping the NZXT s340 an awful lot lately and that's for good reason the industry has taken to an obsession with power supply shrouds shifting or eliminating main compartment hard drive cages and compacting down to mid tower size and none of that's necessarily a bad thing the increase in drive density has lessened the requirement for multiple hard drives and optical drives are basically obsolete at this point so stripping down cases to remove unneeded structure that obstructs cooling especially is an overall positive direction for the 70 took $100 mid tower market fan tax eclipsed P 400 ships in two varieties the P 400 and p400s the latter of which cost $10 more for some sound damping foam and the P 400 is listed at a base price of $70 about the same as the S 340 which is 60 to 70 and just under the 400 C which is 90 but the P 400 which is $70 goes to $80 if you buy it in white and it also goes to $80 if you buy it in the p400s the p400s with white goes to $90 so depending on what you buy it changes quite a bit and if you wanted to add more harddrive cages that's an extra seven dollars per cage and this whole model the fact that I've just listed three or four different prices for two cases with identical tooling and chassis identical everything except for some sound naming foam and remove the side window and the fact that these have ancillary charges for extras is a part of a greater problem with fantex failure to understand the industry they've taken this DLC seasonpass approach to computer components and they've got accessories and add-ons and drive cages and power couplers and dual system cases where they should probably be standard and simply changing the color of the case at ten dollars it's confusing and it reminds us of a model that videocards had taken in days past where so many SKUs and prices existed for the same silicon that buyers got confused and frustrated and just well bought something else because it's easier but we'll return to that argument moment thoroughly before getting there let's talk about the cases core features it specs interior exterior and then we'll go through the thermals and all that good stuff the p400 is an ATX mid tower that ships stock with two fans one 120 in the front bottom and one 120 in the rear optionally an additional 120 fan can be installed on the front or two top 140 fans and radiator support for a iOS exists up to 360 millilitres in the front which we have not validated or 242 80 in the top but not in every scenario and we have tested some of those there are seven expansion slots - 3.5 inch hard drive slots hidden under the PSU shad toward the front and 2 2.5 inch SSD sleds at the rear of the board tray pretty standard as an extra feature a 10 color LED creates an under globe below the front panel of the case cycled through using a button in the front now the PSU shroud is the big obvious feature here and it's actually more problematic for fantex than it is functional first off the vertical clearance is so close to the PSU that the shroud actually scratched the top of our standard form factor PSU a pretty expensive one at that thanks to some low hanging tabs on the chassis once you're able to diagonally cram your power supply into position kale management is immediately troublesome with regard to both EPS 12 volt and PCIe cables PCIe cabling should be routed through a cutout in the top of the PSU shroud but unfortunately fantex haven't thought of that and so it's got to go through the board tray channeling and this is something that courser has done well with their 400 see though they didn't do it there's 600 C and we did criticize them for that pretty heavily and NZXT has done well with its cases on the market in fact even Rosewill with the gun near and Rosewell is a sort of store brand of Newegg they even have the cable cutouts in the power supply shroud now if that was too petty for you I've got more the power supply shroud is riddled with holes for presumably airflow I suppose but that doesn't really make any sense at all considering the power supply fan should be pointed down and these are holes not ducts so had fantex designs ducts to better draft the air into the GPU fans they make sense maybe but here it's just unnecessary drilling through the Paris flight shower that creates a more industrial but functionally useless look I mentioned also though the EPS 12-volt connectors let's move back to that in most circumstances clearance won't be a problem for this as a CPU power but if you try to install a radiator in the top and you may have extra fans up there you run into an issue where the EPS connector from the main compartment is the only way throughout the cable because if you do it through the channel into the back there will be collision issues with some other boards and as many of you know the motherboards move the EPS connector around depending on who made it and what the spec is so in some instances like one of our EVGA boards that is actually an issue where there's a collision low profile memory also must be used in such an instance so we specialize in thermal testing here and we use a couple of thermocouple readers attached to thermocouples k spec thermocouples test methodologies and the full review links in the description below hit that link to learn more about how we test the p4 100 uses a thick plastic paneling on the front that obstructs air flow NZXT Corsair and ROS will also do this with their similarly designed cases but they're all running either side ventilation or more serious bottom and top breathing ports the P 400 has a breathing port in the bottom front panel that's pretty small and it's got poor ventilation overall that's largely for looks in the top panel with nothing at all on the sides for the first test we actually removed the p400s faceplate to determine just how damaging it really is when it comes to air flow and results were somewhat impressive we've done these types of tests before but the difference here was just pretty massive and it's comparable really to go in almost fully open air with the open air bench GPU performance improves by nearly 10 Celsius I'm going to remove the faceplate with CPU thermals gaining a couple degrees on their own 10 Celsius is big especially on the GPU and now obviously it's not realistic or good form to run a case with no front panel you may as well just run an open bench at that point but it does highlight fan tax poor thermal testing with the P 400 and shows that the enclosure should minimally host ventilation on the sides or at least use a thinner plastic fin set with a lower density for the comically useless top ventilation on the front panel but let's put the faceplate back on and look at how this thing performs against this competition fan tax Eclipse P 400 enclosure is the hottest on the bench for CPUs operate night 43.1 Celsius delta T / ambient just behind Rose wells new gun near case at forty two point four one and NZXT s340 at forty one point nine two the courts are 400 C outperforms the whole lot of mid tower shroud happy enclosures and the 600 C a much larger enclosure with a greater cooling focus winds out on the chart no big surprise there GPU thermals tell a slightly different story now the P 400 poles marginally ahead of the s 340 and the Ganga near is technically ahead of the P 400 but the lead is within margin of error at staggering 0.1 Celsius difference not a whole lot and effectively identical in performance across the board and all of that is without even talking about the small stuff which is what fan tax most routinely fails out with a P 400 it's these small items that are classic of a sort of newer company to market where they're trying to follow new trends as quickly as possible and not necessarily focusing on the greater picture like innovating new types of these mid tower cases which definitely can be done and all these small problems with the P 400 just add up to a lack of experience for example the top of the PSU shroud is riddled with not only useless holes but exposed screws in the middle of a landscape of industrial looking barren steel the screws are there to interact with structure underneath the shroud but you might not know it from a glance they just sort of look pointless like they were forgotten there fantex should have riveted the underlying structure or screwed it in from literally anywhere else in that area because the entire point of a power splash shroud is to clean up the build but I guess fan tax missed the memo a couple years ago when these got big because this sort of negates that with this industrial leftover parts look rather than going for a cleaner look that not only hides the cables which this does technically do but also looks clean in its own right the 10 color light is another issue of trying to fit too much into a cheap case the light bleeds undesirably and produces a harsh conical beam of light that over exposes its underlying surface rather than dispersing more naturally across the table for that import racer under glow that fantex seems to have wanted to get this effect the P 400 would have to use a better lens with its diodes or use more lights with the softer emission across the board neither of which is necessarily with production cost on apparently a $70 case because they're already charging $10 more just to make it white so if they can't really add these higher quality lights or deploy them in a higher quality fashion it just doesn't seem worth it to me to have at all because it just appears cheap and sort of borderline childish rather than befitting of a case whose archetype begs to be discrete but hey if you really like the look the P 409s non white I guess isn't that bad of a deal it's when you start adding all these DLC add-ons that it becomes a bit more bloated the case is thermally unimpressive it's not bad it performs about the same as its competitors but fantex really could have driven this home with a better thermal design they could have driven it home with a lot of things really it's just all these small things add up and make a case that is unimpressive and somewhat disappointing across the board then when you look at all this DLC add-on seasonpass stuff they've done with the hard drive cages and the fact that the whole case is different prices for different colors and ten dollars more for science which to be fair other companies have done that Silverstone course are both done that foam cost money but it's it just kind of feels a bit insulting almost as a buyer where these some of these things are normally included like the drive cages used to be just thrown in a box and included I feel like I'm saying the same thing I said when DLC was coming out and you sat there you know 10 15 years ago going this used to be in the game or this used to be called an expansion pack I feel sort of deja boo' with the case and that's not something I like so overall here's the deal if you like this case you like how it looks don't let me talk you how to buying it because ultimately thermally it performs about the same as some of its competitors but when it comes to ease of installations lacking on cable management features it's lacking on class and design for some of the internals and it's missing out on overall vision I would strongly recommend looking at the cases immediate competitors before pulling the trigger on anything and those would include the NZXT s340 and the Corsair 400 C which is technically $20 more than this unit but that puts it at the same price as the white and silenced version of the P 400 so this is the two main ones I'd look at there are plenty of other cases in the $70 range some of them years old but they're still good they're all good cases for the most part if you sort of narrow it down to the made designs that have survived over the however many years they've been out and if you still like this case more if or if you just generally like the classless industrial look of the inside which obviously I'm not a fan of but that doesn't mean it's bad if you are then go ahead and buy it but that is all I have to say about this case check the patreon link the post roll video if you wanna help us out directly hit the length of description below if you want to read the review with our test methodology and more information on that thanks for watching I'll see you all next time you