A Closer Look - Inside

Simply remove two thumbscrews holding each side panel in place to access the interior. The inverted nature of the interior makes the main panel the one with the I/O and hard-drive cages. This means that you have to connect the separate leads as you close up the case; and also make sure to carefully take it off the chassis. As the Phenom uses the same side panel as the Prodigy, you will also find two spots for 2.5" HDDs here.


You can clearly see another bracket for hard drives running down the side of the interior once the main side panel has been removed. The bracket is attached to the frame by four screws and needs to be removed for the assembly process. Once gone, you have a clear path to the motherboard tray. There is a large opening in that tray; it allows for easy access to the CPU cooler's underside, but there is no room to hide cables in behind the tray.


Taking a closer look at the front of the chassis, there is a large air vent with various fan-mounting possibilities, but it will be blocked by an installed PSU. The very top has the single 5.25" drive bay, which should allow for the installation of an optical drive; that said, it is meant to be used as an additional hard-drive slot within the Phenom Micro-ATX.


There is nothing out of the ordinary in the rear, besides the arrangement. The exhaust fan in the back is of the retail BitFenix Spectre variety and utilizes a 3-pin connector. Above that are the five expansion slots, and that is pretty much it here.


You will find the PSU bay on the floor of the Phenom Micro-ATX; it comes with a bracket, so you may prepare a power supply outside of the case before securing it with a single thumbscrew. There is a 120 mm fan in the middle of the floor. It would have been more interesting as a pre-installed fan in the ceiling, pushing hot air out of the top to make sure both hard-drive bays on the floor are readily accessible, but I assume BitFenix meant to ensure as much airflow as possible around the CPU area instead. You can only see one of the two 3.5" hard-drive spots on the floor of the chassis by default. To recap, we so far have two 2.5" and three 3.5" placement possibilities for storage drives.


You may install up to two 120 mm fans in the top to push hot air out the top of the chassis. The metal mesh cover also comes with a dust filter, so you don't have to worry about dust entering the chassis, regardless of the configuration.


We have not forgotten about the extra HDD panel we removed at the beginning. It allows for three 2.5" and two 3.5" drive to be installed within the Phenom Micro-ATX, which raises the total number of possible drives within this compact chassis to five 2.5" and five 3.5" variants—loads for a case of this size.


Before diving into the assembly process, let us take a quick look at the main cables within the Phenom Micro-ATX. There are the USB 3.0 and Audio ones, both sleeved black to go with the color of the chassis; but you will also find a special, angled PSU plug to route the connector to the back of the case and the usual case cables for power, reset, and all LEDs.