Installing the Components


We didn't have quite as much space in this case as we did with the previously tested Silverstone Raven, although the two cases don't really compete directly for the same audience. We did like the hard drive cages, which provide plenty of extra room for airflow and improved hard drive cooling. The drawback of course is that you can only fit a maximum of nine hard drives -- or six without an extra hard drive cage -- into the case.

We almost always encounter some difficulties when installing our test components into Antec cases, and this is no exception. The big problem is that our 8800 Ultra graphics cards are simply too long. It's not possible to use these particular graphics cards while also populating all six hard drive bays. With the graphics cards in place, we were unable to get the hard drive cage back where it belongs. It ended up sticking out 1 cm at the front, and that's before we even tried to attach cables. With large graphics cards, it's very likely that you will need to avoid using the middle hard drive cage. In fact, we also couldn't use the top drive location for the bottom drive cage. One alternative if you don't need to have more than one optical drive is to move the middle hard drive cage up a couple notches. As it stands, with 380 800 Ultra graphics cards and no change in the positioning of the drive cages, we were only able to use two hard drives.



Inside Test Setup
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  • Bonesdad - Monday, February 16, 2009 - link

    Exactly my point...I live in a house...not the Battlestar Crapactica.

    Frakkin case designers...are they all 12 years old?
  • Mikey - Wednesday, March 4, 2009 - link

    LOL, good one. I do think it's pretty "cool" looking, but beauty really is in the eye of the beholder..in this case...the beholder's an old blind guy. It's cool in the sense its very high tech and retro looking, but ugly in terms of elegance. As far as functionality goes, I think it's a great case with lots of awesome features for the advanced computer guru. I would actually consider buying it! http://findaerialequipment.com/">aerial lifts ftw
  • Nfarce - Monday, February 16, 2009 - link

    LOL. Point taken. Well, there's always the P180 or P182 from Antec for the more conservative PC building aficionados among us. IMO, Alienware/Dell has some more hideous/gaudy looking cases than this - and they are selling reasonably well.

    http://www.alienware.com/products/desktop-computer...">http://www.alienware.com/products/desktop-computer...

  • FATCamaro - Friday, February 13, 2009 - link

    Agreed... puke!!
  • cparka23 - Friday, February 13, 2009 - link

    FYI, the graph has noise measured in degrees Celsius.
  • wicko - Friday, February 13, 2009 - link

    Cool review, but would have been nice to see it pit against its predecessor. I'd have to say I'm not a big fan of the top of the case, I actually use the tray at the top.

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