NZXT Phantom 820 Full-Tower Chassis Review
Peter Donnell / 12 years ago
This is a pretty special chassis, so I decided to take my time with the layout of our components, paying extra care when it come to cable management. For the build I also broke out the big guns and opted for a set of Bitfenix Alchemy cable extensions to help keep things looking neat and tidy. The extra cable length this provided also helped me navigate the large chassis frame while also adding a touch of style that compliments the Phantoms design.
I’ve also opted to remove the rear 140mm cooling fan in favour of our Antec 920 water cooling radiator with its dual 120mm push/pull fans. By doing this it allowed me to install the 140mm NZXT fan to the right of our GPU on the tiltable bracket, this of course provides even better airflow to our GTX 560 Ti.
All these little touches added up and the build took me a little over 1 hour, over double the amount of time it normally takes me to put a system together. Its clear that the extra effort has paid off, with the cable management inside the system looking fantastic and airflow within the chassis remaining unobstructed.
With the 140mm fan tipped at an angle thanks to the pivoting bracket helping channel airflow from the front intake fan of the chassis, I can target the airflow right into the back of the GPU, this is obviously a big benefit to cooling and will really prove rewarding if you operate a multi-GPU system.
The unique screw mounts allow me to adjust the height of our Antec 920, so for this build I opted to mount it as high as possible within the chassis. This has given me a huge amount of clearance from the GPU but there is also a huge amount of space between the CPU cooling black and the radiator itself. This give great flexibility for what kind of cooling you choose to install and can also have a big impact on the aesthetics of the build.
The back panel looks neat and tidy. The GTX 560 Ti has plenty of airflow thanks to the ventilated expansion slot covers and there is no doubt that there is plenty of room for a robust quad GPU system here.
