Virtual Renaissance
LENGTH OF TIME: 2-4 HOURS
LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: HARD
THE CONCEPT
THERE’S NO QUESTION that we’ve long been big fans of the Phanteks Shift line-up of chassis. Over the last few years, it’s certainly featured in a number of our builds. It’s one of those cases that really sparks the imagination when considering the potential of a system. That eccentric monolithic design was perhaps the first case to reimagine what an ITX chassis could look like, and how it could function. It doesn’t look quite so distinctive nowadays, with the likes of the NZXT H1, Corsair One, and Xbox Series X all featuring a similar sort of look and feel, but there’s no denying that even today, the Shift still flaunts a certain amount of flair, even with the heavy competition it faces.
However, case designs like this do tend to suffer from one problem in particular: airflow. This is something Phanteks has addressed across the last two iterations of its Shift Air chassis, though—in fact, you can read more about that in our review this issue (pg. 82). With the announcement of the Shift 2 Air late last year, we knew we had to get one in for a build, and with our resident staffer Sam jumping into the world of the virtual this month (pg. 18), there was no better scenario in which to use it than an overkill VR rig. Building a small-form-factor PC for anyone looking to pop one in their living room or man-cave made a lot of sense.
When VR launched with the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift in 2016, system
