Hardware Installation
You will find a small brown box inside one of the empty drive bays containing various screws, zip ties, and an installation guide.
The interior of the Eclipse P300 is a fairly spacious for a mid-tower ATX chassis, mainly because it lacks internal drive bay racks in the main chamber. The company claims this chassis supports up to EATX size motherboards, but there is a caveat: The EATX motherboards must be 275mm (10.8") or smaller, even though full-sized EATX boards can be as large as 330mm (13") wide. The seven expansion slots can accommodate 3-Way SLI and CrossFire systems but, depending on the length and size of your graphics cards, things could get tight in dual and triple card configurations.
There are a total of seven small cable pass-through holes with rolled metal edges in the motherboard tray for cable management. Some of these will be blocked depending on the size of your motherboard. The cable pass-through hole at the upper left hand edge of the motherboard tray is specifically designed for routing fan cables and the ATX12V/EPS12V power cable. There is also a large hole in the motherboard tray behind the CPU socket area to facilitate heatsink changes without removing the motherboard.
The Eclipse P300 has a total of four internal drive bays. The two under the PSU tunnel can be used for both 2.5" and 3.5" drives. Behind the motherboard tray there are two mounting locations for 2.5” SSD, although only one drive caddy is included with the case.
We found it odd that the 3.5” drive caddies, accessible only by removing the front panel, situate our hard drives so that the SATA and power connectors face outward from the chassis. 2.5” drives can be mounted with SATA and power connectors facing the inside of the chassis, but, because of the way the drives are fastened to the drive caddy, it is almost impossible to attach a power cable to the drive. In the end, we installed our 2.5” SSD in the location behind the motherboard tray to avoid clearance issues.
The airflow in the Eclipse P300 is extremely limited. After all, it ships with only one 120mm exhaust fan, and although we are fully aware that this is done as a cost cutting measure, and enthusiasts prefer to add their own fans, we still think Phanteks should have included at least one intake fan to improve airflow.
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