NZXT Phantom Case Review

1. Introduction2. Packaging 3. The exterior view4. Have a look inside5. System build6. Testing methodology and Everest7. Furmark GPU torture test8. Our final thoughts 9. View All Pages

Test System

NZXT Phantom Full Tower
Gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H v2.0
HexaCore AMD Phenom II X6 1055T
HIS Radeon 5850 Turbo 1GB PCI-e 2.1
8GB G-Skill Ripjaws DDR III 1600
Corsair HX850 watt modular PSU
64GB Kingston V-Series SSD rev2 (OS drive)
WD 500GB SATA II (Storage)
LG 16x DVDRW Drive

Software

Windows 7 Professional x64
Everest Ultimate
Furmark

Before we get to any testing we have included an image that indicates how air flow will travel based on the out of the box configuration. NZXT has chosen to use 2 x 120mm side intake fans, 1 x 120mm rear exhaust fan and 1 x 200mm top mounted exhaust fan.  There is still plenty of room to expand on the default cooling configuration at a later date if the cooling does not meet our needs. There is the option to use a 120mm or 140mm as a front intake fan, a 200mm fan can be added to the side panel and another 200 mm fan can be added to the top mounting position.

Our test system was built from scratch prior to installing Windows 7 Professional. Next we download and install all of the necessary patches and finally we installed the applications used for our testing.  We ran each of our tests for five thirty minute cycles and then averaged the results to obtain our final numbers.

With all the fans connected to the built in fan controller there is no way to monitor the actual fan speeds. For this reason we will use 2 different fan settings to conduct our testing. The first series will be done with all fans running at the minimum RPM's and the 2nd set will be done with all the fans at their maximum speed. After we complete those two tests we will then add an additional NZXT 120mm fan to the front intake position and run each of  the tests again to determine what impact the front intake fan has on our system temperatures.

Our first  test today is the Everest Stability test. This application stresses all areas of our test system and can give us a good indication of the overall cooling ability of our case. The graphics portion or today's testing will consist of 5, 30 minute cycles running Furmark. The totals of the 5 runs are then averaged to reach our final numbers.

With all fans running at their minimum speed they are barely audible and would not be considered offensive in any way. Even at the low speeds the temperatures we recorded were very respectable and consistently 1 to  2 degrees Celsius lower the then same components when they were in the Tempest EVO with the fans being controlled by the motherboards PWM feature.

Cranking up the fans speeds results in an a noticeable increase to the noise level as we would expect. It also decreased our recoded temperatures on average by 3 to 4 degrees Celsius which is not too bad at all. Even with all our fans maxed out, while noticeable, the system remains within what we would consider to be tolerable noise levels. To be honest when we were gaming fan noise was never an issue, a smaller faster spinning GPU fan with speeds at 70% or above would produce the dominant fan noise in our test environment. Let's move on and see if Furmark can conquer the Phantoms cooling  capabilities.

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