Phanteks Enthoo Primo Case Review

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.