NZXT Phantom 820 Full-Tower Chassis Review

Now that we have explored the exterior of the new Phantom, it’s time to explore the interior. The back plate for the motherboard appears to be lifted right out of the Switch 810, as it features the same extensive layout of cable management cutouts. a large rear cutaway section for mounting the CPU cooler and support for some of the more extreme motherboards on the market. Check out this image of the 810 Switch to see what I mean.

Now I don’t have any issues with this being the same (or at least extremely similar) backplate from the 810 Switch. The 810 is one of the finest chassis designs on the market and the saying goes “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it” applies nicely here.

One of the first things I noticed though was that while the 810 Switch comes with two internal fan mounts to the left of the storage bays, the Phantom only comes with 1 mounting point and no fan pre-installed in this space, but we’ll take a closer look at that in the build section of this review.

Behind the left side panel you can see the high contrasting black and white fan which comes pre-installed in the chassis.

The back of the chassis we can see the two pre-installed fans, both of which will help shift a serious amount of air and heat from the chassis. The nine expansion slot covers come fitted with thumbscrews, which make for quick and easy component installation and changes. The PSU mounting area comes with four durable rubber pegs for the PSU to rest on. These not only give a little extra clearance for the PSU intake fan to get a better airflow, but also helps reduce any vibrations from the PSU itself.

The 5.25″ drive bays each come fitted with NZXTs quick release mechanism, allowing for tool free installation and removal of your optical drives and similar devices. Further down from there we have the rear facing hard drive bays. While the top half is accessible from the right side of the chassis, the lower compartment slides out from the left thanks to two easy to use thumb clips. You could also opt to remove this bay completely to allow for a larger additional cooling installation in the base of the chassis.

As you can see here I have removed the bottom drive tray below which you can just about see some additional mounting holes for attaching things like cooling fans or even a water cooling radiator.

The Phantoms front panel comes extensively pre wired, this is of course to provide you with all the connections required for the fan controller, SD card reader, I/O ports and HUE lighting system. I will point out the the HUE lighting system is independant and only requires a power connection to operate, no software or OS is required to benefit from this feature.

Much like the 810 Switch the Phantom comes with a cable extension for the 4+4 motherboard power cable, which you can see hanging from the top right of the chassis. Given the size of the Phantom it is common that the stock PSU cable wouldn’t reach the motherboard connector, so this is a very welcome feature.

The hard drive docks come in two parts. The top compartment houses four 3.5″ or 2.5″ drives while the bottom mounted on will support two more drives of either size.