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NZXT Phantom 820 Full Tower Gaming Case Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips

2012-10-21
ha funny story guys I already unboxed this but I was wearing a shirt that was a brand that NZXT competes with can you imagine how they'd feel about that so we are refilling this is the NZXT phantom 820 gold on and beyond your maximum cooling is the tagline that goes with it and on the side this is a 30 pound case guys and I'm unboxing it again I'm like weight training today alright on the side we find a whole bunch of information about cooling this thing has three 200 millimeter fans included on the top front top and side it has a rear 140 included as well but you can swap it out to a 120 if you want to use a radiator size that's more readily available bottom 2 by 140 or 2x1 20 meaning you can do a bottom mounted dual 120 millimeter radiator so you can have up to 360 mm rad on the top a 120 in the back and a 240 in the bottom Wow mine alone they give you specs in terms of how large your CPU coolers can be your video cooler can be an how much room there is for cable management let me tell you 3 and 1/2 centimeters is a lot of room for cable management you shouldn't have any trouble with that at all construction there's that 32 pound weight it's fully XL ATX and ATX compatible meaning you can put pretty much whatever you want it the original phantom has been replaced includes a 4 channel digital fan controller with 15 watts per channel that means you can do high powered fans or even multiple fans per channel to create cooling zones within your system you can also use their hue lighting system and illumination system for exterior and interior and interior lighting of your enclosure very cool stuff and you can have an infinite number of possible colors using the integrated adjustments and controls this is more about the cooling which I kind of covered already although the pedestal that it sits on actually enhances the cooling potential because it means that you can get more air coming up from the bottom it's not just for looks that's a reviewers guide you guys don't need to see that this is a nice touch check this out instead of including a cardboard box with all the stuff you need they have included a like badass plastic box it has everything all compartmentalized and sorted fan sighs and you got your thumb screws and your radiator mounting screws your cable ties all that is included a nice little new sealable box for you that's pretty cool they've also got what appears to be I don't know some kind of user's manual with like labels and stuff okay we'll figure it out as we go and finally you've got a little brochure about how NZXT is sort of ballin and they have sort of ballin products and you can buy them there you go next thing is to take this down and dump it out and I'll just do that the size makes it a little awkward part of it is that the case is big part of it is this I'm a little small now while I would have preferred to see a soft foam as you can see our packing foam did get damaged in shipping so this corner took a significant blow however there was no damage to the case so NZXT has a lot of experience shipping fully assembled systems in their cases so I would hope that whatever they've done to design the packaging in this case they have considered that you can see it's up to two two and a half inches thick in some places so as long as it doesn't get hit in the same place really hard a couple times in a row you should be okay just something that you want to let's see if I can so just something you want to consider guys if that this Phantom 820 did get shipped to me by round from the US so this is pretty much I don't know you'd like a you can't say worst-case scenario because I'm the courier will always find another way to to beat something up more in transit but this is this is not something that was shipped on a pallet and was 100% protected during transit so while I love soft packing foam the packing material outch wool that got me really good did you hear that the packing material did hold up in transit so I can't criticize it too much let's go ahead for plastic this is as far as we got last time so this is my first time actually seeing the case itself as you can see it's wow that was quite the static something yeah oh it is quite large it is here we'll start at the back actually because that'll give you guys a better idea of how freakin big this is so that is like hold on a second how does this work give me a sec guys and I get it so you can move around the 120 millimeter or 140 millimeter cooling fan that's a neat feature so if you if it's going to interfere with a radiator you can move it down if you want it closer to your vrm you can move it up very cool stuff for included water cooling grommets and one two three four five six seven eight nine PCI slots meaning you can install even the longest XL ATX motherboards with no difficulty bottom mounted power supply with very very high pedestal check this out so you can see these these pieces right here that support the power supply keep it nice and high off the bottom of the case plus the fact that the entire case sits on the little pedestal meaning you're going to get lots of cooling into your power supply I actually recently had a power supply die due to not getting enough cooling through that bottom fan because it was sitting on carpet and the case did not have a pedestal here's the fan filter that can be easily removed and clicks into place which is very convenient for those of you who like to remove things without you know tools and hassle all right let's have a look at the side panel so side panel has that 200 millimeter cooling fan very neat shape to these vents actually see that they've got some 3d sort of pop to them some texture to them so it looks uh looks really neat there we go see you guys can see that and then the window I usually like to see a bit bigger of a window although they are at least showing the parts that like the key parts that matter around that CPU socket area where you're going to have lots of cool liquid cooling tubes and all that kind of good stuff let's go ahead and took this bad boy down now got another 200 millimeter cooling fan right there remember you can do up to a triple radiator up here and the way they've designed the top of the case this time is all about cooling so you see this mesh here more mesh down there and this is all ventilated so you'll be able to get an ample amount of airflow coming out of the top of the case front USB pay are not skimping on for us 2.0 ports two USB 3.0 ports and then all the ports that you could ask for over here so this looks like switching between the various you know what I don't have to figure out how this works but there's your front panel headphone and microphone that's your power switch there's your reset switch here is some of that included lighting effects stuff that they got going on let's go have a look at the front so the front reminds me very much of the original phantom in fact not a whole lot has changed about the styling although there's more filtered intakes which you can go ahead and pop right back into place there are four five and a quarter inch base ah cool card reader love that SD card reader is included you can change the led modes change the hues using ah using the dial right here and then you can control the i/o LED off that's really cool neat seekeen and there's more lighting effects here and under here here check this out so there's more lighting effects right around there very very cool okay so going back to the front ah what else we got here so very nice finish NZXT is done traditionally a really good job of color matching their plastic to their metal so check this out this is about as close as you can get see the challenge is that the plastic has a much smoother finish than paint so you end up with well you know you end up with no matter what you do different but as soon as you get more than I'd say about two to three feet away you can't tell the difference at all which is about as good as it gets other side panel has some again some like some texture some 3d is to it so this pops out this gives you lots of room for cable management and anything else you'd need to get over to your drives in all likelihood let's finish with a look at the bottom of the case as I mentioned before is sitting up on this pedestal that has lots of holes in it for ample airflow to get in the sides here there you go see the sides as well as through the bottom if it if it is if it needs to there's all that filtered intake whatnot and there are the rubber feet that the entire case sits on I mean you know what let's turn the camera off while I open it up and we'll be back in a moment actually this is something I recognize from the switch so you take these two screws out and then you can actually turn the the side panels into a bit of a tool this thing here so you just go ahead and move that down pop the side panel off and then you can lock it back into place just like that now the inside of this thing is actually fairly modular so I want to start with those features at the very beginning here so you can actually slide out this entire bank of hard drive cages so the included hard drive sleds can support either three and a half inch drives completely to lessly or two and a half inch SSDs on the middle of them without without any difficulty so you just kind of slide those in from the back you'll have to open up the sort of the opposite side panels from what you'd normally expect in order to install a drive and once you actually get a drive mounted in these there'll be quite a bit more rigid so you could just have to kind of arrange them carefully one time and then there you go so those are sitting in there once you do that you can actually remove four screws take this piece out and that's how you're going to mount that dual 120 or dual - or dual 120 dual 120 or dual 140 millimeter radiator in the front that's going to draw air up from the bottom of the pedestal here this one doesn't come out by the look of it oh yes it does oh cool okay so you can pull this one out too you can mount a 120 or 140 millimeter fan here using just two holes and then you can actually adjust it if you want it to point here then you just tighten the screw you loosen the screw if you want it to point up more towards the CPU socket you go ahead and tighten it right there and the final sit kind of like that pulling air away over the hard drives and then up in this direction lots oh yeah great so you can take out these three five and a quarter inch bays as well and you can see inside here that there's a secondary sort of top here so you can just yeah move things around and take them out as you see fit I mean obviously you can't like I don't mean move things around but move them started physically out of the case if you don't need drive mounting here and you just want that 200 your fan blowing air right in so that's very cool stuff I mentioned this before but you've got ample ample support for no matter what kind of power supply you put in here and the cable routing options are fantastic so I often complain about this when you've got a billion cable management holes up here and then you've got like one right next to the power supply because it's pretty simple math what goes in here must come out there at some point NZXT has taken that sort of to the next level here and they've got three cable management options right next to the power supply one slightly above it this is more like for your front panel audio or whatever else and then you've got lots of different options up here for where it's going to come out that triple 120 millimeter radiator that I talked about before that'll go right here but right now there's a 200 mil fan that's mounted in the top in its stead so you can easily pull that out here's the included case lighting strip so that's going to light up your case well that's what case lighting does I suppose um and let's have a look at how many more three and a half inch or two and a half inch drives can be mounted in the other side here oh I just stepped on a molex connector I'm gonna need that later but not now al that hurt okay I'm good I'm okay thanks for asking for three and a half inch sleds or two and a half inch sleds whatever you prefer are in there then from the back you can see there is tons of room for cable management because you've got all this space that is trying to hold these out of the way all this space here remember it starts here and actually bulges out over here so all this space here plus the space that's in here as well so that's a total of three and a half centimeters no big deal huge CPU cut out hole so that's really convenient because you won't have to remove the motherboard in order to mount a different CPU cooler that has a backplate and check this out they include an individually sleeved eight pin cable extension that's fantastic so they're assuming you got this super long case and our super tall case and your power supply probably won't have a long enough eight pin they go ahead and throw that in for you I think that's like a six or eight or $10 value or something like that that's what typically these individually sleep things get charged so yeah oops that's awesome included cables I mean look at this because of all the different stuff that this case has going on there are a lot of included wires that you're going to need to route so this is power 4 in all likelihood you're included fan controller and/or lighting system these oh boy you know what I don't actually necessarily want to speculate as to what each of these individual power connectors are powering but you've got a SATA power and a molex power I'm going to assume you need those for something you've got fan there we go fan harnesses that you can go ahead and plug fans into if you want to use them with the integrated fan controller you can see they're actually labeled F R F T so front/rear top and then there's probably one more zone I'm trying to look for a for a B one is okay sure whatever so there's a ton of those you've got the integrated USB three you've got and must have two headers for front USB two so here's one of them there must be a header somewhere here's the help one for front panel audio which is no USB to USB to USB 2 oh right sorry three USB 2's okay given how many motherboards have three USB two front panel headers it makes sense I guess HD audio and yeah you guys are going to want to work on your cable management a little bit the good news is NZXT includes lots of cable management anchors here so all B's here here here here here here here here here and just generally all over the place allow you to anchor down cables just like they've done here to make sure that everything lays flat enough that you're going to be able to close the case once you are done with it I think that pretty much covers everything I wanted to say about the back so the last thing I want to do is throw a power supply in here just to check out this included lighting system the integrated fan controller is outstanding so that turns out it turns out that that's the molex plug all you got to do is use the selector up here which is the middle one to okay so to front/back so here we can actually say see the brightness of the LED indicates how much power is being delivered to it to the fan so go around and check out the background I'm going to turn it all the way down and it's actually going to turn that fan right off very very cool although the included fans are very quiet anyways here I'm turning it back on now so that's that's a really neat feature and it turns out the SATA power is for the integrated LED lighting so let's go ahead and turn that on so you can see things are lit up green I'm going to go ahead and sort of kill the lights in here so I can give you guys a better look at how this case looks with the integrated lighting effects so actually it lights it up really really well you get a nice even glow inside and I'm gonna go ahead and see what we can do in terms of changing things so I don't know what this does okay oh cool that's neat so going all the way up to white there you go and don't forget it's up here as well so there's ah there's lighting here did you see the one over here I don't know if you ever saw that one so there's one here so that changes colors as well and then the ones inside and then you can also ah there's the IO LED so if you want to find a way to plug your cables in in the dark there's just a front switch there including your PCI slots this is very very cool as well and then there's LED modes so there's okay there we go so we'll cycle through these so there's none inside only which turns off the one over here and then there's inside and outside so let's go ahead cycle through those colors a little bit very very cool that's the one I'd build that looks awesome I think I'm in the wrong mode haha there we go nice like fuchsia interior lighting ballin thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the phantom 820 from NZXT don't forget to subscribe to honest tech tips from unboxings reviews and other computer videos
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