NZXT PHANTOM 530 Review

 

Up Close:  Rear of Motherboard area

We here at OC3D find the reverse side of the Motherboard nearly as exciting as the front side.  Sure round the front is where all the sexy kit goes, but it’s back here that all the hard work is done to make the wiring and cable management look clean and tidy.   Nothing makes us cringe more than a load of high end kit stuffed into a case amongst a viper’s nest of wires and tubes.  When we look at the rear we look for three things.  Cable management holes, cable tie points and depth of space available.  We’re pleased to say that like the other cases in the Phantom line the 530 excels in all three areas.  With 3 large vertical and one horizontal rubber grommeted holes, not to mention the large PSU out hole and a few smaller scattered holes there’s plenty of places to route those pesky cables through.  A total of 25 cable tie points also means that that you’re not going to struggle to get them all running where you want them. 

     

 

Centrally located in the rear of the case lies a single channel 30W fan controller hub.  The hub is supplied via a molex from your PSU and has 3 pin outputs for up to 10 fans, meaning you can put in a 240mm rad with a 4 fan push pull system in the front, a 360mm rad with3 fans in the roof as well as a 140mm extract at the rear and still have 2 ports left over.  To the right of the fan hub there’s a mounting bracket for a single 2.5″ drive.  The bracket is secured with a screw meaning you can mount your drive to it and then attach the whole shooting match to the case.  We quite like these brackets although we would like to see them rotated 90 degrees and moved closer to the edge to make cable management easier.

     

 

It’s nice to see the use of screws in a case as opposed to all joints being riveted as this makes it much easier for the modder to ply his trade.  The image below left shows the metal top of the case being secured with 3 screws making it’s removal a doddle.  Unlikely that it is that you’re going to need to remove the floor of the case, it will be much trickier as the screws have been well and truly painted over.

     

 

The third factor we look for at the rear of the motherboard is the space available for cable routing.  Again NZXT get it right with 26mm of space for the majority of he area and up to 34mm in some areas.  Much more room than that and you’d see us twitching to see if we could get a rad back here.