With the NV7, Phanteks takes the wraps off what their vision for cases will be in 2023, with more variants planned in the future. The fact that the NV7 is the first to be unveiled says a lot about what Phanteks considers their strongest position to be: big, spacious and flashy enclosures is where they can separate themselves clearly from the competition. That does hold true, starting with the fact that there are far fewer Full-Tower cases than Mid-Tower ones and there are a mere handful of brands that try themselves at complete custom cooling support for these form factors. Phanteks has long managed to put its own design stamp onto this case segment with a long line of large enclosures and the NV7 manages to do so as well. At $220, without any fans, you are certainly expected to pay for the material costs and engineering that went into it, but even so the price still feels adequate.

The Phanteks NV7 does manage to refocus Phanteks efforts a bit more in regards to a modern Full-Tower, which was really needed. If you look at their product stack, their more compact offerings got plenty of attention with several SKUs across all their family of enclosures, whereas the tall and spacious ones did not. Even so, with their past Full-Tower cases, Phanteks went their own way both in terms of design as well as functionality and the NV7 manages to reduce that sometimes overwhelming set of features. Even so, the NV7 still packs a ton of unique elements in combination with the same modern approach to building big systems that has become the norm. This means offering tons of cooling potential - be it air or liquid, the ability to assemble these outside of the chassis and the fact that cables are hidden and routed nicely.

One small beef we have is the D-RGB controller. Not because it is bad, but because it can be considered the golden standard from a functional perspective. As such it hurts that you won't be able to use it with your other A-RGB devices like AIOs, fans or GPUs, because Phanteks opts for proprietary connectors and does not offer an adapter to interface A-RGB units with their technical, walled garden. In other words, if you are wanting to go A-RGB and sync things up, you are relegated to motherboard & software control and thus those buttons at the top of the case become useless.

Overall, the Phanteks NV7 is an excellent chassis for those who really will utilize the space. If you don't quite love the case, it may be worth holding out a bit longer to see what else Phanteks has in store for this product line. We would not be surprised to see smaller NV5, NV3 or even NV1 options.