Reviews Phanteks Eclipse P600S Review

Yet another black and grey monolith. So little meaningful differentiation between cases at this level now, that it seems to me that, unless you really must have the latest feature, you may as well just hang on to what you have until it is old and tired after a good number of years.

 

Wait what? You mean you upgrade your case like you upgrade components in your PC?

I plan a build around form factor or specific case, and then build it, but the case and the PC are one forever. I upgrade the components, but the thought of upgrading a case seems weird to me. To me the case is just the box for the system, if I'm gonna change the box, I'll change the system inside as well...

 

You could say that. I replaced my last case 2 years ago but, built an (almost) all new PC in it last year. The old case was a Zalman around 10 years old. My FD Define R5 has a long and happy life ahead of it.

 

How do they compare this case with the Define R6 which isn’t even listed in the thermal performance tables?

 

I'd rather get a PCIe riser cable & use the vertical mounts intended for the ITX system's GPU. GPU sag is one reason why I went with a horizontal mobo arrangement for my current system

 

I have this case and am surprised there's no mention of the difficulty of using the 3.5" drive cages at the bottom of the case in the PSU shroud (most likely the reviewer didn't try it). There's supposedly space for four 3.5" drives but even with a modular PSU, it'd be extremely hard to do that as there'd not be much space between the drive cages and the PSU meaning cable management would be a nightmare, especially if you're using a number of the bulky cables for ATX and PCI-e power and even if you did manage it, there'd be little or no cool air flowing over the drives nearest the PSU as they'd be blocked by the drives nearest the front of the case. If you have more than two HDDs, you'll be better off mounting the extra drives in the main compartment where they'll benefit from the intake fans.

I have two 3.5" HDDs mounted nearest the case front at the bottom of the case and found it to be a pain to mount - the stackable HDD trays have prongs underneath which slide into four slots on the floor of the case, but there are other (wrong) slots in front of those slots which you have to careful to avoid otherwise one of the prongs will get stuck and it's a pain to free it. Also, there's a mere 2mm or so clearance between lower HDD tray's underside and the case floor so you have to feed the flat SATA power cable under the HDD tray before fitting the tray and even then it's tricky to connect the power to the lower disk (I'm pretty sure there's some strain on that connection). I have a 4TB Toshiba 7200rpm drive stacked on top of a WD Blue 2TB 5400rpm in the PSU shroud in front of the bottom of the lowest front intake fan (I have the three stock fans as front intake) and their idle temps are 39 and 30 degrees respectively. I have the same drives stacked in an old Antec P193 sited squarely in front a 120mm fan and they're at 30 and 29 degrees which suggests there's not as much cool air getting to the drives in the P600's PSU shroud.

I wish they'd included a dust filter on the roof for those of us that use an air cooler and might want to fit intake fans there, though I'm otherwise happy with the cooling performance of the case and probably wouldn't bother with top intake fans unless I was fitting a very toasty GPU.

I agree with the comments about GPU anti-sag bracket, I can't see how it'd be effective with a long/heavy GPU as the bracket just applies tension to the lower prong of the expansion card plate, it's not going to help with sagging of a long/heavy GPU, in which case I'd use something like this or mount it vertically, it's great this case provides that option but surely that will just have the GPU blowing warm air onto the mobo?

I'd have liked an HDD activity LED on this case, yes you can re-purpose the power-on indicator LED but other (even much cheaper) cases include the HDD activity LED so why not this one? I've got a separate LED connected to the mobo header which I can see flashing through the glass side panel so that'll have to do for me.