An In depth look at the Phanteks Enthoo Primo Case
First up is the overall of the case. I have to say I was impressed with the styling of it. I know pictures and tech specs had been released prior to us here at ModCrash getting the case for review but in the end I hadn’t looked at anything until I took it out of the box (except for the box art a course!). One thing I have always been a big fan of is a nice clean look overall. Smooth edges and everything coming together seamlessly. I have never been a huge fan of cases with doors but Phanteks did a great job blending it in so you know it’s there but doesn’t catch your eye immediately when looking at it.
Taking the cover off the front intake fans in very easy to do along with putting it back on. It simply slides and snaps into place without much effort and doesn’t move afterwards. As you see the door opens to five 5.25″ optical bays to put anything you want from a DVD drive to a fan controller. Mind you that if your fan controller does have physical knobs or switches that protrude out from the face that it will not work in this case with everything flush. You would have to recess your fan controller into the case.
This shot was to give an idea of how the front slides into the bottom then you latch it at the top with a push. As you see also it has a built-in mesh dust filter for easy cleaning.
As you can see in the bottom of the case are two mesh dust filters that can be pulled out.
Not pictures is the piece that comes off the top which also has a mesh dust filter in it. all of these filters are easily cleaned with canned air.
This is what the back looks like right out of the box. I love what Phanteks did. Most cases I’ve seen you just get a jumble of wires zip tied together for you to figure out cable management and unscramble to see what you need. Phanteks did this for you. Everything is very neatly ran and has Velcro tie wraps to keep it all in place. I can’t go into enough detail about the endless way to do cable management in this case. Absolutely one of my favorites to date. Only one or two things I personally would change to make it perfect but this is as close to perfect as I have held in my hands.
You will have to excuse my cable management skills on this build but I love how this case mounts the PSU in the back. I would almost say I got lazy with cable management because it definitely wont be seen at all except my wires actually connecting to the motherboard. When the Corsair 540D came out I was very interesting in having the PSU mounted behind the motherboard and not in sight but did not like how wide the case was to do that whereas Phanteks simply just made it where you mount the PSU on the side and you hardly notice it every again. Oh yeah and when you do need to change things around, add, remove, or whatever you feel like you no longer have to undo and redo all your pretty work you might have done for the people looking inside you case.
One last thing to share about the back is how big the cutout for the motherboard is. The motherboard I put into this case is an ASUS Z87-A ATX board. If you have noticed it doesn’t even cover whole area and give you ample room to change out the back plate for your CPU cooler no matter how big, small, Intel, or AMD.
Now onto the front! As you see this case is HUGE! Now think about this, the GPU I used for the picture is the massive AMD Radeon HD 7990. Yeah AMD’s flagship GPU up until recently but still one of the biggest on the market in terms of sheer physical dimensions. Make it look like a baby GPU in my opinion instead of the beast that it is. One thing I did not get a picture of is if you do have a shorter GPU that Phanteks does have a cover that well covers your cables going to the motherboard. It basically covers the main 24 pin power connector, SATA ports, ect. The bottom of the base is very spacious and it almost give this build a very minimalist look to it since to me it looks like almost nothing is inside this case.
Here is a better up close picture of the inside.
Now Phanteks has some very pretty shots of their case and I wanted to put some up here to truly showcase how pretty this case is and show a couple more aspects of it. These last few photos are all courtesy of Phanteks.
As you can see Phanteks put a lot of thought into the design of this case when bring it to market and it has paid off. Head over to the next page for my final thoughts and conclusion.