Phanteks Enthoo Primo Case Review
by Dustin Sklavos on August 10, 2013 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
- Water Cooling
- Phanteks
Phanteks gives the Enthoo Primo a unique advantage by allowing the motherboard's 4-pin PWM fan control to split off and control all the 3-pin fans in the enclosure (provided the motherboard itself can supply enough power to all of those fans); if you've been reading me for a while you know I'm a big advocate of fan control, and I'm very fond of this particular solution. It's a simple and fine-grained alternative.
The Enthoo Primo was tested at an ambient temperature of about 23C. The bay area has been unusually cool for these summer months, so I'm fairly certain we're going to have a punishingly hot Indian Summer soon.
The unique cooling design of the Enthoo Primo benefits from the bottom intake fan, but it's difficult for air from that intake, or from the front intakes, to make the journey to the CPU heatsink. You'll see this is a recurring theme with the Enthoo Primo; CPU cooling performance has been sacrificed for better GPU thermals.
Noise levels are outstanding for a case that has no acoustic padding. The split-PWM fan control definitely gets the job done.
Overclock the components, though, and the tradeoff becomes more pronounced. You get great GPU thermal performance, but the CPU suffers. This is a case that would probably benefit tremendously from a 280mm closed loop cooler mounted to the top as an intake. That in mind, I'm disinclined to ding Phanteks too much for their performance here.
Once again the Phanteks Enthoo Primo posts exemplary acoustic performance. Incredibly quiet at idle, reasonably quiet under load.
Full fat thermal testing continues to be unkind to the CPU, while the rest of the case's performance is still fairly competitive. The bottom GPU is going to get the lion's share of the cooling performance owing to the bottom intake.
Again, though, check out those noise levels. The Enthoo Primo is among the quietest cases we've tested when built to bear with the full fat testbed.
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Alan G - Saturday, August 10, 2013 - link
+1 on the mini-ITX request; I'm starting on my third build with this size board because that's what my friends want. I'm not prepared to spend over $200 for a case like this one as it's truly overkill IMO. Even though the from panel is closed off, what does anyone need with 5 5.25" drive bays? For my photographer friends I don't even put card readers in these days because USB 3.0 readers are cheap and if a pin ever gets bent (and this does happen) they get a new one for $30 and the case doesn't have to be opened and things pulled apart and installed.I think there are just too many good alternatives to this case for less money.
BillyONeal - Saturday, August 10, 2013 - link
There need to be more mini-ITX cases worth reviewing for that :)Grok42 - Sunday, August 11, 2013 - link
The truth hurts. While there are some good mITX cases that haven't been reviewed, they aren't recent cases. I can understand not wanting to review a 2-year old design but I would still appreciate it.zero2dash - Saturday, August 10, 2013 - link
"Full ATX accounts for less than 5% of the tech enthusiast community now."I'd love to see the proof to back up that statement.
You can buy plenty of enthusiast mATX/ATX boards for nearly any price point; meanwhile, if you want an enthusiast ITX board, you're going to pay out the nose for it. You're also left with only a few decent cases that do a good enough job at cooling.
ITX works if you have minimal requirements on storage and are only running a single GPU.
f0d - Sunday, August 11, 2013 - link
where is the proof of "Full ATX accounts for less than 5% of the tech enthusiast community now." i know that personally i have only built 1 mini-itx vs about 15 full atx pc's in the last 3 years for friends/familyand that person is now getting me to build an ivy bridge-e full atx system when they come out
noeldillabough - Sunday, August 11, 2013 - link
Which board do you plan to use? I use a raid controller and a discrete sound card so features on board don't really matter to me but I want a stable board with good overclocking potential.Grok42 - Sunday, August 11, 2013 - link
My last build was mITX and I can't see every building anything larger than mATX going forward. The mITX case I chose holds 10 drives. You would be amazed how much space is saved by not having any 5.25" bays.All that said, I'm too would be surprised that only 5% of the market is full ATX case purely based on the quantity of cases available. I guess if we're at an inflection point where everyone is moving away from full ATX it's possible that only 5% bought full ATX in the past month of YTD?
Barbarossa - Wednesday, August 14, 2013 - link
George from Corsair here. Full towers sell in larger numbers than Mini ITX. Look at all the ~$150+ cases that are selling now: NZXT Phantoms, Cooler Master Storm Troopers/Strykers, etc. Full towers are more popular than ever.Mini ITX is growing in popularity but among the "enthusiast" crowd, full towers have increased dramatically in market share in the last couple of years.
Mid Tower ATX is still 70-80% of the total market, with Mini ITX and Full Tower ATX growing and chipping away at the edges. The bell curve is flattening but it's still there.
f0d - Saturday, August 10, 2013 - link
too much plastic and not enough roomi prefer my 900D - im so happy with that case i cant imagine ever needing another case again
HisDivineOrder - Saturday, August 10, 2013 - link
Then the 950D hits and you suddenly awaken one day with the very real ability to imagine it.Take the Obsidian 900D and then make it a huge cube instead. Ba-bam. You can name your new monolith, "The Borg" and add custom Borg cube sound effects when it starts.
Resistance is futile.