Phanteks Enthoo EVOLV ATX Tempered Glass Edition Case Review

A good portion of the case can be disassembled to aid in system installation.  For instance top mounted fans and radiators can be placed in the void above the fan bracket provided you remove the top panel.  Phanteks has secured this panel with screws making the removal rather easy and yet not documented in the manual.

Overall case construction is very good.  All of the structural connections are solid and riveted together.  The interior is very minimalistic partially due to the absence of external drive bays and also the design where the drives are located under the dividing panel.  This gives you a very clean looking system area and hides away the clutter. 

That is unless you have tempered glass side panels. 

In an attempt to provide a bit of scale I installed the Gigabyte X99 SOC Champion to check motherboard alignment and see what kind of cooling clearances there are to work with.  The Gigabyte X99 SOC Champion is an E-ATX motherboard which sits right at the limit of the motherboard compatibility.  On the surface it would appear the motherboard may not fit but there is clearance between the tray and PCB and is also insulated by the rubber grommets. 

For overall fitment the motherboard looks quite nice and you are left with plenty of room to work with and will support tower style coolers up to 194mm tall.   Generally speaking If you look at the exhaust fan you can get a good idea that any cooler supporting a 140mm fan will fit with room to spare.

Above the motherboard this is not quite 25mm of space however, when you consider the fans are pushed away from the motherboard this clearance left is only for cables.

At the bottom of the case the divider plate leave you with little clearance for anything to extending beyond the bottom of the motherboard.  Sadly, this excludes any 4-way SLI or Crossfire configurations but might work for PCI Express SSDs and any card only occupying a single slot.

One of the interesting features of the EVOLV Tempered Glass Edition is the upgraded LED lighting control supporting 10 different colors, a breathing effect and color cycling mode between the 10 different colors.  The lighting control is also transferable to Phanteks LED light strips like the one shown here.   The strips are over 3 feet long, extremely flexible, extremely bright and come with embedded magnets and double stick tape for easy installation.

Strangely enough you use the reset button to activate the lights.  A short press will change the color while a long press (~3 seconds) will change the color pattern from solid, to breathing and then to cycling.  The breathing mode also supports the short press color change whereas cycling will slowly move through the patterns.

As a result the Tempered Glass Edition has no reset button.

You will also get a metal bracket to help with pump installation and a plastic container with dividers for every screw needed on the Phanteks EVOLV ATX.