A Closer Look - Inside

Installing the mainboard is easily achieved by using the black spacers along with the black screws. There is plenty of space around the CPU cooler and even with the Prolimatech Super Mega you should have sufficient access to the surrounding areas. There is plenty of space for even the longest graphic cards out there. The four openings in the mainboard tray should make it easy to route and hide unwanted cables, in turning keeping the interior of the Phantom clean, so that there is enough space for water cooling or the likes.


Inserting the hard drives is a very simple matter as well and does not require any tools if you use a 3.5 inch drive. For those who want to utilize an SSD, the included screws allow you to secure them on the hard drive trays. Slide them into place until they snap down and you are good to go.


Installing the optical drives is a very similar matter. Unclip the front cover, push the drive into place, snap down the black plastic mechanism and lock it into place. It holds fairly well, but I would still use screws, just to make sure the drives stay in place and no vibrations are passed on to the chassis.


The PSU itself is held in place with thumb screws which are supplied with the Hale90 itself. You also have enough such screws as part of the package which ships with the Phantom case. There is plenty of space within the interior to use longer units without having to sacrifice the two hard drive bays.


Once everything is installed, you can still see that there is a boat load of space. Sure, we did not fill the chassis with seven hard drives, four optical drives or dual graphic cards, but even so, you have the ability to hide and route the cables rather nicely.

Finished Looks

Once the side panels were placed unto the chassis, the Phantom makes a very good impression. The door hides any boring drives, while the rear still gives you easy access to everything and I dare say that the white color makes it much easier to find a specific plug in the dark, when crawling around in the dark under your desk. That said, the case is simply too cool looking, to hide it under a table somewhere.


To show you the lighting of the chassis, I turned off the surrounding lights. While I think that the blue LEDs are a nice little touch, just four small such lights in such a large chassis only manage to impress in dark surroundings. NZXT is known for incorporating nifty lighting aspects into their cases, but the Phantom lacks that.


There are a few other lights that turn on. Two of them are for the power and hard drive activity LEDs, while the others are activated if current flows through the fan controller. The latter is a great little feature, and lets the user know which fan is connected instead of trying every slider to get the intended result.