Phanteks Eclipse P300
The budget gods are pleased
THERE’S AN EXPECTATION when shopping for a case on a budget that you’re going to end up with a bum deal. If you’re looking around the $60 mark, the likelihood of finding one with anything resembling modern-day features is slim. Cable management and modern design come at a premium. Want a PSU cover, extensive radiator support, fan mounts, cable management, and tempered glass for less than $90? Get outta here!
The notion has always been that, cases being the least important part of any budget build, you should forsake the fancy features, and just get whatever’s available with the funds you have left after buying everything else. After all, cases are all pretty much the same at this price point.
That’s why Phanteks’s Eclipse P300 is one of the most exciting cases we’ve looked at this year. A $60 chassis, with a feature list longer than Kim Jong Un’s dinner menu.
One glance at its design, and you can easily spot the PSU cover and the tempered glass side panel. But it’s only once you begin building in it that the true depth of Phanteks’s innovation begins to shine through. With 280mm AIO support in the front, including space-saving dust filters, located top and bottom, the forwardfacing panel provides two front-installed 3.25-inch caddies for all your typical hard drive needs. Remove the rear side panel, and you’ll find a single Phanteks 2.5-inch caddy for SSDs mounted to the back of the motherboard tray, and oodles of cable management room, as well. There’s a metal cable cover, too, not entirely dissimilar from the one in NZXT’s S310 case, yet coupled with Phanteks’s championed Velcro straps, of course.
And then there’s the lighting. Fully compatible with any of your aftermarket RGB synching technology from the likes of Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, et al, you do need to invest in the cable to integrate it.
Combine all that with support for up to E-ATX motherboards as big as 275mm in width, and it’s hard to pick fault with this case. So, where are the drawbacks? Well, there’s a few. Firstly, the material used— it’s a basic steel chassis at heart, making it somewhat flexible, and the paint job seems to attract greasy fingermarks. On top of that, there are no rubber grommets included, no GPU power cut-out in the PSU cover, and only a single 120mm fan installed at the rear of the chassis. Our biggest gripe, however, lies with the HDD caddies. Admittedly, we did decide to stick a 2TB WD Black drive in there, but the mounting holes in the toolless design simply didn’t support our drive, and we had to physically remove them from the caddy, then mount the hard drive with screws before installing it.
Ultimately, the Eclipse P300 is an astonishing feat of cost-cutting ingenuity. To find a case at this price point, packing so many modern design features, with so few drawbacks, is staggering. We’d love to see some other color variations in the future, and perhaps a V2 or a Pro line for $10 more that addresses our HDD issues and the lack of rubber grommets and GPU cut-outs. But that aside, it’s perfect for anyone looking to build a brand new budget rig. It’s a chassis that should sell well, and encourage other manufacturers to rethink what they include in their budget offerings. The P300 is to cases what Ryzen was to processors, and for that we can’t credit Phanteks enough. –ZAK STOREY
Phanteks Eclipse P300
MOON Extensive feature set; tempered glass; solid price point; storage support; AIO support; subtle styling.
PLUTO Hard drive caddies. $ 60, www.phanteks.com