Upon opening the case cover, you’re struck not only by the 350W power supply, but also by the austere interior. The Antec midi tower uses preinstalled drive rails for the installation of 5.25" drives. The few drives that will fit go into a built-in modular cage. Special screws and sealing rings acoustically isolate the two 3.5" drives from the rest of the case. There are two extra 3.5" mounting assemblies intended for ZIP or floppy drives, which can be used for additional hard drives if needed. There is no acoustic isolation for these, however.
The case has plenty of room for extension cards, and even long PCI cards fit easily into four of the seven slots. The SLK26050-BQE uses metal screws to anchor cards, but we drew a blank when looking around inside the case for them. It turned out that Antec put them in a special accessories box at the rear. This box is so small and inconspicuous that it is easily overlooked.
The workmanship of the Antec is exemplary. Almost all edges are filed, so there is little danger of injury when installing hardware. A little more space for hard drives would have been better, though.
Austere : not much room for 3.5" hard disks
Guide rails hold the 5.25" drives in place
Only a few drives fit in the cage, which can be removed
- Beauty Is In The Eye Of The Beholder
- The Test Candidates In Detail
- Little Room For Drives
- Little Room For Drives, Continued
- Codegen ATX-6089: Lightweight, And With A Handle
- Upgradeable Interior
- Coms-Com CF-707: Lightweight Model
- Enermax: Milk-White Case
- No-frills Interior
- Foxconn TH-202 Electric Blue: Hellish Encounter
- Illuminated Interior
- Jeantech JNAF600 Visco: Aluminum Case With Strange Air Filters
- The Filter System Takes Up A Lot Of Space
- Nexus Breeze: Plastic Case With Soundproofing
- Drives Under Construction
- Pros
- Kingwin Mutant X: Gamer Case With 420W PSU
- Room For 11 Drives Total
- SilverStone SST-TJ06: Totally Tubular
- Upside-down World
- Hard Drives Are Installed Vertically In The Case
- Uneec 602BLK: The Best Of Many Worlds
- Lots Of Room For Drives
- Pros
- XGBox Viper: A Case With A Bite
- Muzzle For The Back
- Bright Red Paint Job Inside And Out
- Evaluation
- Features Table
- Features Table, Continued
- Features Table, Continued
- Test Procedure
- We Used This Hardware For The Test, Continued