the Phantom is here I have received
endless requests to unbox and uh do a
first look video first impressions video of this case it is NZ xt's
most probably most anticipated case ever
so the first thing we're going to do is break the seals now this is an
evaluation unit so it's not quite the
fit and finish of the product that's actually going to be available on retail
shelves so like it's mostly done but
there's a couple little things like you might find the side panel doesn't fit
quite right etc etc uh so the tooling is
not quite there yet but let's take a
quick look at the outside of the box before we actually open it I know
everyone's very excited to see this thing here we go so we have external 5
and Quin Bays five we have seven internal 3 and 1/2 in bays and then we
have a standard 18 x s expansion slots
on the top we have a 140 mm spot on the
top oh sorry in the front we have a 140 mm spot in the top we have 2X 200 mm
with one included in the rear we have one 120 mm included and on the side we
have 1 200 or 230 mm and two 120 mm and
those are included okay clearance we can accept up to uh 35 cm long video card so
that's quite long that's like what 13 1/2 in or something like that anything
out there basically CPU support is
uh 180 mm assuming you're not using the
side fan and that pretty much takes care of everything here it's available in red
black and white but black and white are the only colors that are going to be
available right off the bat in terms of the other features ample room for wire
management that's one of the things that's got people really talking about
this case as well as the eatx support it has a nice roomy interior so you can
actually see it right here it looks kind of like storm stormtrooper armor actually it's a pretty pretty cool color
scheme with mostly white and then black accents very neat it also includes okay
you got the seven cooling fans with the option of up to three large 200 mil fans
and this is cool because this really ties into how they've got the 200 mm fan
holes in the case you can support up to 5 20 wat channel uh
fans on the controller you have a fan controller that supports up to 20 watt
fans per channel so that's very very
cool because it means you can support big fans fans that move a lot of air and
you can actually do it with the fan controller that's built right into the
case here's uh pictures of the two other colors so the one we have here today I
believe is white uh seven hard drive screwless rails with SSD support and
screwless 5 and 1/4 in design so mostly
tooless but we'll have a look at the case itself very shortly here and we'll
uh we'll definitely talk in more detail about all the Innovations found
within packaging is really good this is so important because unless you're
buying the case at a retail store which I hope you're not because you should be
buying it at ncx H it's important that the case
actually survives its trip to you so NZXT has ample foam packaging built in
around the case you can see they've got it molded to the shape of the top of the
case itself here looks really really good this is a nice sturdy closed cell
foam very very important for ensuring that your case is going to
arrive in one piece same thing for the bottom very nice all custom fitted You'
be surprised how few cases come adequately packed because while it may
be enough for the case to ship on its own what if you ever have to ship a full
system built in the case it becomes quite a bit
heavier all right so let's take the protective plastic off and that is very
very nice look at that cameraman come
get this angle over here right here I'm pointing with my finger where the
cameraman needs to go oh it blocks the light if you a oh okay hold on here I'll
adjust it for you Soh there we go so
that is just a bright white you know what compared to the photos it really
does look way more like stormtrooper armor here than it does uh than it does
in the in the pictures so here's our five 5 and 1/4 in Bays you've got these
cool little uh tabs so cameraman can you zoom in so you can have a look at how
these tabs work you just press the press the little button right there and it
opens it right up so you don't have any uh any stupid metal blocking things once
you've taken these off that's it that's the whole procedure now the case is made
of plastic but it's a very very heavy plastic and it feels very solid so you
look at like little things okay like the inside of the front door you've got uh
like a a matte plastic cover on the
inside of the plastic plastic outer piece so you've got these layers that's
what gives it a rigidity that you wouldn't normally expect from a plastic
case the hinge is also got uh large pegs
so they're not going to just uh come out okay the door closes very very tidy
so the the fit and finish even though this is a pre-production sample as I
mentioned before is perfect on the front door uh the only reason there's finger
prints all over it are from me touching it here but they wipe off quite easily
another thing that we should probably talk about actually is fingerprint
resistance of a finish like this because it is quite shiny the white color is
really good for hiding it you can actually see that already here on the
camera cuz I'm putting my hands all over it and we are not
running sorry about that my camera battery ran out so okay fingerprint
resistance looks to be very very good at least on the white color let's start
having a look at some of the features so right here we've got our fan controllers
so this is uh conveniently coated now I
I don't know what they all mean but I'm going to guess that this one with the two big holes in it is maybe the two big
ones on the top I mean you can play around with it and figure out what they all are but there you are that's where
all of that is connected then on the other side we've got our power reset uh
we've got our LED indicators we have an eata 2 USB 2.0 a mic Port as well as a
headphone Port all right so that's pretty straightforward and let's start
let's have a look at the side panels because I think that's actually pretty
no wait we're not quite done with the front okay cameraman if you want to come down here and have a look that's where
your 140 mm fan Mount is through that mesh right there so you can see these
meshes even though they uh from a bit of
a distance they're they're very uh they're a very solid black so they give
you kind of a a nice patterned appearance to the whole case they're
very free flowing so if you get close you can see through it quite well and
that means that you're going to get lots of air flow traveling through them which is very very good of course Okay so so
let's move on to the side let's start with this side just arbitrarily this
side so this side has uh mesh holes here
so you can see through to the hard drive cages there you can see the back of the
motherboard plate there and uh we'll find out what those holes are although
I'll assume that they're for power supply cable management and uh we've got
a thumb screw back here so why don't I go ahead and show you that so the back
is held on by optionally up to three thumb screws but this just comes with
one which is fine because really unless you're trying to uh I don't know keep
a you know cat or something out of your case you don't need to worry about too
many screws holding on the side panel so there's the side panel itself in terms
of the Finish you can see it's uh just a white paint so this part's metal
obviously so you can see the inside there okay but the white paint finish on
the metal actually matches the white plastic finish on the plastic perfectly
so you don't have to worry about like a a contrast in between those okay so that
side panel you know what we'll have a closer look at that after let's have a look at the back we've got a 120 mil fan
here standard ATX layout here and room
for a standard ATX power supply here so that's all pretty straightforward we
have up to four water cooling tubing grommets uh all along the back of the
case and let's go ahead and look at the other side panel before we take it open
uh take it apart and look at the inside so here we've got our huge 200 or 30 mm
fan Mount and then we have two I believe
those are 140s help me out here on the
side two 120s ah you know what I bet
that's what that code is for the two two circles next to each other oh
well it's okay all right so we'll take
off our other wow these are long thumb screws check this out can you see that
like huge thumb screws okay let's take that off so the
side panel comes up just just like that there we go like I said fit and finish
might not be quite right because this is not uh not a retail case so here's the
two fans that are included there they're NZXT black and white fans so I'm going
to go ahead and put this panel down as soon as the cameraman's done staring at
that fan and then we'll have a look at the inside so this is a very roomy
interior all right we've got a uh an
accessory box here we've got our 7 3 and
1/2 in uh Drive Mount here so why don't we have
a look at how this system works uh this is oh you know what I like this system
this is uses a rubber grommet so here I'll hold this in the Sun so you can see
it so you basically just push the little metal pieces out push them all out you
slip in your hard drive you push them back in and it seems flexible now but
once you get a hard drive in there it's actually much much sturdier it's you've
also got the holes here for a 2 and 1/2 in drive so then all you do is slide
that in there and boom your hard drive is installed very very very very simple
okay in terms of the 5 and 1/4 in you unlock them here and then oh that's kind
of neat check that out okay come come come look at this this is cool okay so
you just slide the lock and then it's
actually like a little flexible piece of
plastic and that's what uh that's what drives the spikes into the side of the
drive can you see those spikes so you just bend it up and then bend it back
down and then lock it and then it doesn't go anymore that's pretty cool
I've never seen one quite like that before all right let me just take out
this uh twist tie here that was holding in our accessory box and let's have a
look at what else we've got here so you got room for quite a long power supply
although not entirely Unlimited in terms
of length and you can mount your power supply one of two ways they have a uh uh
here there's a filter at the bottom here so you can have either a filtered intake
at the bottom or you can flip your power supply around the other way and have it
uh take in case air although I definitely recommend this because
they've got these rubber mounts here that'll keep your power supply Supply
elevated off the bottom of the case and with the filtered intake that's
definitely going to be your best option it supports up to eatx motherboards so
that means you can go all the way over to here with a very very large
potentially dual socket motherboard if you felt like it you've got a CPU cutout
that's going to support most motherboard CPU locations so that means that you can
take off uh large Tower heat sinks or water blocks and put them back on
without taking the motherboard out of the case here's our 120 mil fan let's
have a look into the top of the case here
all right so there's our 200 mil cooling fan and there's our spot for another one
this one is filtered and this one does not appear to be filtered although I
couldn't tell you why at this time oh
it's possible that it's because the way this is set up is uh for negative air
flow right now so that's why the uh open intakes are actually filtered that would
be my that would be my educated guess
okay and let's see what else that we want to uh take a look at here now 140
mm intake comes in here uh let me just
have a quick look at where those so these 200 or these 120 mm fans here are
blowing all over your drives and they're also bringing air into the front where
it can then be drawn across the video cards and hopefully you have rear
exhaust video cards I really think that would be optimal for a case like this
let me see what else we should do but don't we have a look at the
included accessories so pull out my tech tips knife that I now actually carry
almost at all times I cut my with it the other day check this out I tried to
close it I was like closing it like I don't know how I did it but I managed to
close it like right onto my right onto my nail it didn't hurt that much but uh
well there you go knives are dangerous be very careful with them etc
etc okay what do we have so here is a
little metal bracket two metal
brackets okay this is
uh screws long
screws okay here's some cable ties as well as a
PC speaker because there's no integrated speaker into the case so you just plug a
little speaker thing into the top of your motherboard and here is all the
screws that we will potentially need to assemble our system all black screws I
love it those little touches that is what really sets apart a premium case
from a a me2 case so those are your 632
screws so those are your hard drive screws all right here's your mother
board standoffs here's your 632 screws flat so
those ones are probably for installing something presumably motherboard
although there's not enough of them there's only eight okay so I don't
actually know what those are for then we have 632 longer ones okay I'm sure there
is an instruction manual well there is an instruction manual and I'm sure it tells us what to do all with all these a
bunch of thumb screws so there's a little baggie of thumb screws cool and
then here we have some fan screws
here we have some 632 hex screws so
those I'm presuming are for the power supply and then we have some M3 screws
so those would be used for optical drives if we uh wanted to double secure
the optical drive so you can see you can use the little flexi Mount thing here
and then there's also two screw holes right in the front which the cameraman
cannot see from that angle but he'll try and cameraman wants me to look at the
back of the case for some reason anyway that's where those screws go and oh
right we haven't looked at the back of the case yet that's why the cameraman's uh pointing over there so here's all of
the included cables this is getting to be quite a
long video but hopefully you can uh bear with me here here's power for your fan
controller this uses nice beefy wires because you are providing up to 20 watts
per Channel or maybe it's 20 watts total either way it can proide power to some
pretty decent fans so I wouldn't worry too much about it hard drive LED so
there's all your front connectors nice black cable happy to see that we've got
a eSATA front connector right there and then what else do we have here we've got
HD audio there's a USB header and these
are nicely sleeved black and then we've got a couple of uh oh right these are
for uh the three aspects of the fan
controller that are not located up here so the ones that are not already plugged
in so you can see we've got uh two more up here so there's your five five leads
off the integrated fan controller just like that okay well I think that pretty
much covers everything I wanted to talk about get one more dramatic shot of the
front here because I really think that is what stands out about this case more
than anything else is the look of it from the front and kind of seeing the
top as well thank you for checking out my unboxing of the NZXT Phantom I hope
you've enjoyed it I certainly have I can already tell you these are going to sell
like hot cakes