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 refiling this is the NZXT Phantom
820 go above and beyond your maximum cooling is the tagline that goes with it
and on the side this is a 30 lb case guys and I'm unboxing it again I'm like
weight training today all right on the side we find a whole bunch of
information about cooling this thing has three 200 mm 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 a radiator size that's more readily available
bottom 2x 140 or 2x20 meaning you can do
a bottom mounted uh dual 120 mm radiator
so you can have up to a 360 mil r on the top a 120 in the back and a 240 in the
bottom like wow mind blown uh they give
you specs in terms of how large your CPU coolers can be your video cooler can be
and how much room there is for cable management let me tell you 3 and 1 12 centm is a lot of room for cable
management you shouldn't have any trouble with that at all construction
there's that 32 lb weight it's fully XL ATX and eatx compatible and you can put
pretty much whatever you want in it the original Phantom has been replaced
includes a four Channel digital fan controller with 15 watts per channel
that means you can do high powerered fans or even multiple fans per channel
to create cooling zones within your system uh you can also use their Hue
lighting system and illumination system for exterior and interior and interior
lighting of your enclosure very cool stuff it you can have an infinite number
of possible colors using the integrated adjustments and controls uh this is more
about the cooling which I kind of covered already although the pedestal
that it sits on actually enhan is 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 reviewer 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 that
has everything all compartmentalized and sorted by fan size and you got your
thumb screws and your radiator mounting screws and your cable ties all that is
included a nice little resealable box for you so that's pretty cool
they've also got what appears to be I don't know some kind of users manual
with like labels and stuff it's okay we'll figure it out as we go and finally
you've got a little brochure about how NZXT is sort of balling 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 guess
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 that 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
um 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 of this case they have considered that you can see it's up to
two 2 and 1/2 in 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 um just
something that you want to let's see if I can lift this
out uh just something you want to consider guys is that this Phantom 820
did get shipped to me by ground from the US so this is pretty much I don't know
you like you can't say worst case scenario because and the couriers will
always find another way to uh to to beat something up more in transit but uh 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 ouch whoa 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 and peel off the 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 shock
there it is quite large it is here we'll
start at the back actually CU that'll give you guys a better idea of how
freaking 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 mm or 140 mm 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 four included water cooling brommet and 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 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 uh 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 a little ped 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 cuz 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 mm 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 looks uh looks really neat there you 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 uh 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 tilt this bad boy
down now got another 200 mm 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 air flow coming out of the top of the case front
USB they are not skimping on four USB
2.0 ports two USB 3.0 ports and then all
the ports that you could ask for over here so this looks like uh switching
between the various you know what I'm going have to figure out how this works
but there's your front panel headphone and microphone there's your power switch
there's your reset switch here is some of that included lighting effect stuff
that they got going on let's go ahead and 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 5 and 1/4 in Bays
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 io led oh that's really cool
neaty ke and then 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 uh what else we got here so
very nice finish NZXT has 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 it'll always look a little bit different but as soon as you get more than I'd say
about um 2 to 3 fet 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 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 and all like let's finish with a look at the bottom
of the case which as I mentioned before is sitting up on this pedestal that has
lots of holes in it for ample air flow 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 and you know what
let's turn the camera off while I open it up and then we'll be back in a moment
actually this is something I recognized from the switch so you take these these
two screws out and then you can actually turn the uh the side panels into a bit
of a tooless 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 3 and 1/2 in D completely
tooll lessly or 2 and 1/2 in 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 uh sort of the opposite side
panel from what you'd normally expect in order to install a drive and once you
actually get a drive mounted in these they'll be quite a bit more rigid so you
could just have to kind of arrange them carefully one time and then uh there
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 two or dual 120
dual 120 or dual 140 mm 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 oh yes
it does oh cool okay so you can pull
this one out too you can mount a 120 or 140 mm 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 fanel sit kind of
like that pulling air away over the hard drives and then up in this direction
Lots oh yeah right so you can take out these three 5 and 1/4 in Bays as well
and you can see inside here that there's a secondary sort of top here uh 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 sort of
physically out of the case if you don't need Drive mounting here and you just
want that 200 mm 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 mm radiator that I talked
about before that'll go right here but right now there's a 200 mil uh 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 uh light up your case
well that's what case lighting does I suppose um and let's have a look at how
many more 3 and 1/2 in or 2 and 1/2 in drives can be mounted in the other side
here oh I just stepped on a Molex connector I'm going to need that later
but not now ow that hurt okay I'm good I'm okay thanks for asking uh Four 3 and
1/2 in sleds or 2 and 1/2 in 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 I'm
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 3 and 1/2 CM no big deal huge CPU cutout 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 back plate and check this out
they include an individually sleeved 8 Pin cable extension that's fantastic so
they're assuming you got this super long case and a 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 sleeved things get charged
so yeah that's 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 for in all likelihood
your included Ed fan controller and door 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 uh fan here 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 ft so
front rear top and then there's probably
one more zone I'm trying to look for a for a B1 um is okay sure whatever so
there's a ton of those you've got the integrated usb3 you've got you must have two
headers for front USB 2 so here's one of them there must be a header somewhere
here's the other one for front panel audio which is no USB 2 USB 2 USB 2 oh
right sorry three USB 2s okay given how
many motherboards have three USB 2 front panel headers it makes sense I guess um
HD audio and yeah you guys are going to
want to work on your cable management a little bit the good news is ncxt
includes lots of cable management anchors here so all these 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 casee 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 go okay so to front uh back so here we can actually
take see the brightness of the LED indicates how much power is being
delivered to it uh to the fan so go around and check out the back fan 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 anyway see 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
going to go ahead and see what we can do in terms of uh changing things so I
don't know what this does oh okay oh
cool oo that's neat so it goes all the
way up to White there you go and don't forget it's up here as well so there's
uh 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 IED so
if you want to find a way to plug your tables in in the dark there's just a
front switch there including your PCI slots which is very very cool as well
and then there's LED modes so there's uh oh 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 go with that looks
awesome I think I'm in the wrong mode ha
there we go nice like fuchsia interior
lighting balling thank you for checking out my
unboxing and first look at the Phantom 820 from NZXT don't forget to subscribe
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