NZXT Phantom 410

[Lingwendil]

Hey y'all,

 

A few years ago an old friend upgraded his rig, and gave me his old stripped NZXT Phantom 410 case. It promptly sat in my workshop and gathered dust from all my woodworking projects. I already had a primary gaming build and a workshop Thinkstation rig, so it sat waiting until some stuff came along enough to piece together another build for fun and the kids. I had initially thought of painting it purple and going for a Halo Covenant theme because of the styling, but wasn't in a hurry.

 

Fast forward to a month ago, and I find a mangled and smashed Corsair PC case in the e-waste at work- with intact case fans, motherboard, and some SAS drive bays for drive cloning. After clearing it through the dudes in charge (just to make sure I was clear to grab whatever I want) I went full vulture and stripped it of parts, with other dude taking the SAS controller card and cables. I ended up with the drive bays, an Asus Z170-P ATX LGA1151 DDR4 motherboard, 2 white LED fans, 1 rear exhaust fan, 550W power supply, CPU, and stock Intel cooler. No Ram, so I grabbed a cheap set of Silicon Power "GAMING" (  ) DDR4 from Amazon.

 

Here is the haul-

 

Upon looking into things more, it turns out I have an Intel I7- 6700T, cool little 35W TDP guy. I dug out an old Rocketfish clone of the Cooler Master TX3 EVO, that I've had in the parts bin since 2012. Perfect fit. Should be fine for a 35W CPU.

 

 

Dug out an old Lite-On SATA Lightscribe drive to fill the open drive bay slot-

 

 

I stashed away the 550W PSU for later use, and bolted it all together with an EVGA 400W PSU, and the white LED fans up front. Rear has the exhaust fan from the Corsair case-

 

I waited a few days for RAM to come in, and it fired right up. I set it up with a generic 256GB m.2 SSD. Installed windows, and played with it a few days. Added a Noctua 120mm fan on the side panel to blow air directly on the GPU. For the cheap Silicon Power 3200CL16 RAM XMP even worked great and stable with no additional work 

 

I have since been playing around with different GPUs, as the onboard graphics just would not do. I have an GTX 1070 EVGA SC GAMING ACX 3.0 I can put in that would be a decent match, but it currently has an Nvidia Quadro RTX 4000 in there simply because I had one handy. Not sure what to do but since the 1070 is a bit older i think it may end up in there long term. This week I'm going to transfer the boot drive to a Samsung 970 512GB NVME and just have fun with it.

 

 

Here's the PC Partpicker list-

 

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: Intel Core i7-6700T 2.8 GHz Quad-Core OEM/Tray Processor 
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper TX3 Evo 43.1 CFM CPU Cooler 
Motherboard: Asus Z170-P ATX LGA1151 Motherboard 
Memory: Silicon Power GAMING 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory  ($29.97 @ Amazon) 
Storage: Samsung 970 Evo 500 GB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive  ($61.99 @ Amazon) 
Video Card: EVGA SC GAMING ACX 3.0 GeForce GTX 1070 8 GB Video Card 
Case: NZXT Phantom 410 ATX Mid Tower Case 
Power Supply: EVGA 400 N1 400 W ATX Power Supply  ($48.99 @ Walmart) 
Optical Drive: Lite-On iHAS124-14 DVD/CD Writer  ($24.00 @ Amazon) 
Case Fan: Corsair SP120 62.74 CFM 120 mm Fan 
Case Fan: Noctua A12x25 FLX 60.09 CFM 120 mm Fan  ($32.95 @ Amazon) 
Total: $197.90
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2023-06-20 15:06 EDT-0400

 

 

This thing is loads of fun, and super nice to work in. Gonna play with more fan configs, and install some games. Then I might strip it down and prep for paint. I'm only into it ~32$USD for RAM so far, everything else was parts scrounged or repurposed. Might keep an eye out for an i7-7700K to do some overclocking and upgrade the cooler to suit.

 

 

 

 

[SansVarnic]

-= Topic moved to Build Logs =-

[Lingwendil]

So, as things usually go, I decided to put some fancier parts in it. I swapped in a Samsung 970 500GB NVME drive. A friend gave me an old Coolermaster ARGB controller, so I ordered some Thermalright RGB fans, and a Burst Assassin BA120 RGB cooler to match. The cooler is way overkill for my 35W TDP 6700T, but will be a good fit if/when i decide to upgrade later on- especially since I may try to grab a 6700K or 7700K if I get the chance, and then I'll play with some overclocking.

 

New cooler is significantly larger (120mm vs 92mm) and is pretty nice quality-

 

Swapped in the new cooler, new fans to the front two positions, and to the rear exhaust, as well as some RGB strips I had on hand from an older project-

 

 

Man, that GPU looks tiny in there, being single slot!

 

I then added a couple fans up top-

 

 

And then I cut some spare scrap 1/16" acrylic to block off the larger gaps on the front and back side a bit more.

 

 

Heres the ARGB controller, just tucked in here for now. You can also see the PCB at the bottom that I soldered up so i can use jumpers to manually set the 12V RGB strips to whatever color I want. I'm going to tuck all this away better later when I cable manage everything a bit better.

 

 

This is all very silly when you consider that it lives in my woodshop, but simply adding the fans up top brought me down from 82C to 73C when benchmarking in Heaven with the Quadro RTX 4000, as I'm now more effectively forcing air past the card. Note the empty (thoroughly washed with soapy water, of course) refried beans tin that I use as a catch-all for stuff like pencils, screws, drill bits, etc while working on projects at this ancient steel desk.

 

Also spy that Submarine Controller 

 

I have been playing Halo: Reach (Master Chief Collection via Steam) on it recently and it performs beautifully. Solid rig for someone like me who rarely plays brand new games or is trying to go max FPS. Fans cost about ~$13USD shipped per set of 3 (I bought six total, and still have one left) and the CPU cooler was $24USD shipped. That and the ram I bought I'm still into it under $100USD.

 

Still considering paint but I will be stripping it down and cleaning it up eventually to start prep for it.