Phanteks Enthoo Primo
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
3,616 words · ~18 min read
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Corsair Raptor K40 keyboard and M45 Mouse are designed to provide best
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in-class features and performance for gaming click now to learn more the
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fantex enu Primo you guys have been asking me for this for a while and here
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it is we're going to start with packaging it comes in a box which you
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may or may not have expected it's also got some nice soft Clos cell foam
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because of how heavy this case is and especially how heavy it's going to be
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once it's Laden with Hardware like man this thing's heavy I wouldn't have
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minded seeing a little bit thicker foam like what Silverstone does on some of
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their higher end cases but it should pretty much arrive in one piece even
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with a system inside in most cases let's start with the accessories inside the
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little accessory box that's included you get a radiator bracket so this allows
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you to install up to a dual 120 mm Radiator on the side if you're willing
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to remove the hard drive cages don't worry there will still be SSD mounts you
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also get a nice little Kit full of screws it's got little compartments for
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all the different kinds of screws that come with the case actually it's amazing
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how many different kinds of screws are used on this case it actually has more
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than the 10 compartments worth of different screws which I discovered when
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I undid the this thing right here the reservoir mounting bracket that was
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actually inside in the first place because it was unfortunately useless if
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you have a gaming grade graphics card that's sort of a normal length then it's
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going to interfere with that anyway the good news is that there are other places
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that you can mount your radiator without any difficulty finally finally we've got
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the rest of the accessories here we've got two little foam pieces in case you
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want to install a second power supply in the U primo and then some zip ties as
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well as two more velcro straps in addition to the ones that are inside the
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case so let's start with the outside the front of the case actually I didn't
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really like it that much before it was powered on and before it had an entire
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system in it it's got a gorgeous brushed aluminum finish now this is a bit of a
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double-edged sword because it looks great out of the box but if you get fingerprints on it it can stain over
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time so just make sure you're careful with it it has a blue LED strip
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Illuminating not only the front but also the top and then if you remove the front
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cover it's actually got two blue LED fans that give a very pleasing glow to
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the front of the case as well the great news about all these LEDs is that you
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can actually toggle them on and off with a switch that's built into the front of
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the case you've also got an extremely Solid 5 and 1/4 in bay door up at the
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front that conceals five 5 and a/4 in base it has a very solid feel to it and
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closes with a satisfying thunk because it is
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magnetized so quite like the front of the case the last thing to note about
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the front is that that removable piece that gives us access to those fans has a
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removable cleanable fan filter that's got kind of a complex design to it you
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would just I guess run the whole thing underwater as opposed to removing the
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actual filter from the front piece because the way it's constructed allows
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the front uh bottom air vents like the kind of the side front bottom air vents
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to intake air and still have it be filtered in addition to any air that's
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coming through the front of the case which brings us to the top which is also
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gorgeous you know brushed aluminum finish two USB 2.0 ports two USB 3.0
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ports that have little rubber you know covers on them that will get lost
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immediately Power reset switch as well as that LED control switch that controls
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not only the LEDs on those front fans and the LED strip but also can control
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additional LED fans in the case there's actually a bunch of lead I believe
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there's four additional leads inside the case and it can control control your
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internal case lighting because it has a Molex connector that it Powers as well
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so you could have your interior lighting and you could hook up pretty much whatever you want to it and have the
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whole thing turn on and off with the push of a switch speaking of pushing we
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can remove the top fan filter just like that go ahead and clean that or do
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whatever it is you need to do with it this also reveals a ton of space at the
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top for fans and radiators you can do up to three 140 mm fans or four 120 mm fans
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and because there's enough clearance between the top of the internals and the
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top of the and the bottom of this fan filter you can actually do a push pull
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configuration with a quad Radiator in here quite comfortably in fact the enthu
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Primo is a water cooling a water Cooler's wet dream so to speak because
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of all the options that are available in it so let's go around to the right hand
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side where we find not a whole lot of much of anything there's two 120 mm fan
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mounts these are mostly only going to be used if you do decide to install that
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optional bracket or I shouldn't say Mounds I mean two you know holes two
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ventilation holes there's also a ventilation hole for the power supply
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intake the power supply only goes in well one of the power supplies only goes
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in one way in this case on the left hand side we have two little Windows one that
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reveals a fantex logo and that's pretty much about it other than that it's just
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kind of a a stealth uh panel there across the 3 and 1/2 in Drive cages
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and the cool thing about that fantex logo is you can actually replace it quite easily it's held on with screws
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from the backside so you can put them whenever you want and then a nice large
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sort of U tinted window that gives you a
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nice look at your not your power supply ah yes it has a bit of an unusual
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internal layout so all it really shows you is your motherboard as well as your
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graphics cards and that kind of cool stuff so the slightly different internal
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L let's go ahead and oh boy this thing's heavy I'm going to try and move it
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around a little bit here so you you can see that the power supply is actually vertical that's what allows you to
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install up to two power supplies in the case you can also put a 120 or 140 mm
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fan here at the back should you so desire there's another Reservoir Mount
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here thankfully so that original one that wasn't very good we don't have to use that also at the back we've got
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either a one 120 or 140 mm fan Mount you can go ahead and slide that up and down
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as needed the last thing I do want to show about the outside is oh wow it's
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heavy ouch got my finger even more
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removable fan filters so you go ahead and click these ones down here on the
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bottom and they slide out from the side this reveals ah yes you can have up to a
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triple or rather quadruple 120 mm uh
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radiator mounted in the bottom as well
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so that gives you two 480 mm RADS both
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with filters and potential for awesomeness of course you would have to
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remove the 3 and 1/2 in Drive cages if you wanted to do that now the fans that
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are included with the case not the greatest you know work mhip ever they
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have a bit of a quite a bit of flex to them they don't feel like the greatest
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thing but fantex does include five of them which is pretty generous
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considering the cases large feature Rich and cost
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$249.99 I don't usually mention pricing but cases don't change much so there you
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go um the good news about them is that especially with the included fan
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controller they are quite quiet so I was overall pleased with the included fan
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quality and quantity so there's two 140s in the front one 140 in the bottom a 140
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in the back and finally a 140 in the top this is kind of funny I have an h100i
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that I've managed to install in the system so there's another 100 sort
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slightly less than 120 mm Gap here and then there's two 120s over here in the 5
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and 1/4 inch Bay there's a 140 here manag to install that without even
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removing any of the stock fans so we still have all of the original air
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cooling which is sort of funny to me the
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manual is great because it gives you a couple of useful matrices there's one
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for uh radiator installation so it gives you a little check checklist of where
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all the different radiators fit and all that good stuff it also gives you a
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little Matrix for all the different places you can put Fen so while it's not
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as good as someone like silverstone's manuals where they actually walk you
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through the entire process of building in it I'd say it's complete enough to
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give you a good idea of what you are up against now I say up against but
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experienced Builders really won't have that much of a challenge the side panels
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are unexceptional on the inside except you can see that the one with the two
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120 mm vent spots on it is actually blocked by default so you can go ahead
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pull that off if you do decide to mount fans or a radiator there um now why it's
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not challenging is because they actually do a lot of the wiring for you so we're
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going to go ahead and move around to the back check this out I love the way that
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fantex has done most of the cable management out of the box so they've got
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their nice little velcro ties which are all down here all down here for the
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eight pin across here for the bottom where you're going to run your USB 2
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your front panel audio and all that good stuff and they've also got a ton of the
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other little standard hoop and look Loop tie off
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things um that go along with the zip ties that they've included actually
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gives you a ton of cable management options but I didn't undo most of it all
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I really did was I took the fans out of here and then I routed them all here to
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the integrated fan controller this can support up to 11 fans that are all
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controlled via pwm and it actually works incredibly well more on that in a little
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while so I routed all the fans there I routed my 24 pin my four PCI Express
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connectors up here there's a reason I installed two graphics cards in this
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system I wanted to see if there was going to be enough clearance here to be
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able to run two graphics card worth of PCIe cables and a 24 pin and USB 3 and
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all that stuff and there was and then I just um doubled back with a couple of
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these ones to where they needed to go and that was pretty much it other than that cable management is a breeze in
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here and even though I didn't do a great job of managing things uh you know
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carefully up the side here or laying things flat and and utilizing the back
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of the motherboard tray better it looks incredibly clean and looks great from
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the front now this is something that I
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sometimes feel really good about and sometimes don't feel as good about something that I
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I sometimes bothers me about Corsair's cases is that they don't leave much room
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for flexibility they come meant to be wired a certain way and everyone's build
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will look great in it and that's fantastic but everyone's build will kind
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of look the same fantex has taken that approach with a lot of the pre-wiring
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but they haven't gone too far down that path you have a lot of options you can
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actually remove the 3 and 1/2 in Bays here you can actually remove the 5 and
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a/4 in bail though you will need to drill out some rivets if you want to do
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that and you can just fill the bloody thing with radiators you can uh you can
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put your power supply on the other side you can still do things differently it's
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just that I generally wouldn't really recommend it because the way that they have it wired up here is quite nice
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installing the power supply was like the easiest thing ever you just kind of drop
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it in there there's a lot of space to work with next to the power supply here
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unless you install a pump on the included pump anti vibration rubber pad
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which is awesome it happens to have the correct holes for the Lang D5 or
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swifttech mCP 6 655 which is my personal
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favorite pump nothing else really matters to me it's great to see that
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included there's also more room for a reservoir over here should you so desire
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if you're going to remove those 3 and 1/2 in cages installing drives as a snap
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actually it's a kind of a really smart little system here so they have two
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little nubbins here and here and then they have these wings that come out see
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these snap out and then what you do is you just put the drive on click them
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into place there's no ending there's no flexing there's no goofy stuff like that
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and once you put it in it actually feels very very solid the one thing that
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doesn't feel that solid about the 3 and 1/2 in cages is the entire cage assembly
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itself they've made it modular so you can actually move it closer to those two
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140 mm fans at the front to give yourself some more space over here you
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can take them out entirely but I feel like it could have used a little bit
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more reinforcement the other drives that I installed I put a single 2 and 1/2 in
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SSD in to one of their little uh
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removable brackets here now these little 2 and2 in Brackets can take up to two
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drives each but I think in in a practical sort of unless you're buying
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adapter so you're going to need to make sure you use straight cables you might have trouble putting two drives in them
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so uh Beware of that and then the other thing I didn't like about these was the
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fact that they don't screw in in any way there's nice little rubber grommets that
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they go ahead and clip into quite nicely and mostly you're going to be installing
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ssds in there so even if in shipping uh a drive came flying off and rattling
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around it would probably be fine if you ever put a hard drive there or if the
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SSD manag to like come loose and whack something I don't know I I don't like
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things that don't at least have the option to screw in the cool thing about
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this in terms of options is that you can go ahead and you can install it here on the back of the motherboard tray if you
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want rather than over there so you've got two brackets with up to three
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different places that you can install them moving around to the front the
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amount of space in this case is just very obvious and apparent I went with a
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sort of air cooled and then all-in-one liquid cooled configuration but you can
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do pretty much anything with this thing in fact there were a couple of really
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cool build logs that I found on Linus Tech tips Forum as well as overclock.net
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uh one where the uh the bloke actually
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put RADS in the bottom front and top and then manag to hide all of the tubing
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without even being able to see it and then the one on the line is Tech tips
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Forum was quite exceptional as well and it shows the creativity that this case
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does allow the fact that there is adequate Cable Management room for up to
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four graphics cards they do have eight PCI slots in the back and then the fact
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that you can put an eat motherboard in here these are all very very positive
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things and uh I think they've managed to make room for all of that without having
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it be full of empty space like something like the Cosmos 2 um tends to be in the
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bottom here by default you can put uh nice thick radiator or you can actually
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even slip a fan in the back here if you want and I think that's pretty much all
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there is to say about it tool is 5 and a/4 inch Drive cages lots of cable
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management grommets and that's that's pretty much it for the inside so um
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cooling with air is actually very awesome and this is actually it's time
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to do my little demo here so check this out guys um the fact that it includes
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that pwm fan controller is really cool so I'm going to go ahead I'm going to intentionally let my CPU overheat by
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undoing two of the thumb screws here now this isn't something that I necessarily
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recommend you can hear the system in my lab it's running very quietly right now
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so I'm going to go ahead and detach this and without providing any additional
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power to the adapter on the back to that fan controller um and you should check
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the fantex website to make that your motherboard supports that I can pull
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this off and listen to
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this the entire case Works harder to
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keep that CPU cool and now when I go ahead and pop the block back on there
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the entire thing is going to quiet down again this is an out standing little
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feature and then the uh the LED control is also fantastic as well overall what
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do I have to say about the enu Primo very solid case considering the
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price the build quality is what I consider to be what you would expect you
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can see where they've spent money on things like the gorgeous aluminum finish
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on the front and the top um as well as on the tooling and the design that
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enables them to bring all this functionality into what is a fairly reasonable size when you consider how
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much stuff you can put into it I don't personally like the weight and I find it
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a little bit difficult to move around but for some people that'll be much less
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of a concern love the flexibility that it affords I think the looks are going
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to be a take it or leave it depending on how you feel about the you know the the
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two- tiered like kind of stepped look to the top as well as the kind of busy and
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yet black and monolithic looking front but overall I quite like it I think it
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looks much better in person than it is than it does in pictures and videos and
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it looks much better once you've actually got a rig in it and you can appreciate the efficient use of the
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space so overall definitely a thumbs up for fantex on this one and I look
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forward to seeing the enu duo or whatever more enus we might get in the
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future guys like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it check
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out the link in the video description I talked about the price in this video so you don't need that to find out the
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price but you might want to discuss the video somewhere other than the YouTube
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comments you know Wild West that they are and as always guys don't forget to
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