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Antec P180 & Nine Hundred |
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Written by Vladimir Gojkovic
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Tuesday, 31 July 2007 |
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Page 2 of 3
The P180 model belongs to the Big Tower range of computer enclosures, but it's very well designed, so that one wouldn't guess at first glance that it's such a large case. The first impression is that the case is most elegant - the basis is black, while the front and side panels are silver; there are no sharp bezels anywhere. On the front panel there are (already standard) 2 USB and 1 FireWire port, a microphone input and a headphone output, and finally something that isn't exactly that usual - a keylock for locking the front door.
After opening the aforementioned door, the potential of this case slowly begins to reveal itself. Under the 5.25" opening (which there are 4 of), are located 2 plastic grids, with slots for 120 mm fans behind them. When those grids are pressed on one side, they open from that side only to reveal - filters! It's been a long time since we saw an idea that simple, but that functional. Instead of vacuum-cleaning the inside of the case, all dust is kept on this couple of filters, which can be easily removed and washed/vacuum-cleaned on their own! Sounds just like TV ads, right? There is just enough space left between the two fans for the 3.5" Floppy drive. Alongside the front panel fans, there is also one 120 mm on the back and one on top of the case.
By opening the side panel, you will see the inside split into two parts - the upper part that we would expect in any Midi Tower case (i.e. room for motherboard and its components, 5.25" devices, 3.5" Floppy drive and an HDD cage for 3 HDDs), and the lower part that consists of another HDD cage (thus increasing the installable number of hard-disks to 6) and room for the PSU (not included with the enclosure). Placing the power-supply unit at the bottom of the case has become somewhat ordinary practice in Antec, and although this decision won't have any direct impact, the fact is that it isn't such a bad idea to separate the PSU-generated heat from the rest-of-the-system-generated one. Also, this enabled the engineers to place the aforementioned 120 mm fan on top of the case.
However, this layout of the case may leave you with PSU cables too short to reach all of the components! This, of course, we cannot count as a flaw, since cable length is within the PSU manufacturer's area of responsibility. If this issue still happens, Antec made sure to mention in the manual that their own PSUs have cables that are long enough ;-) The interesting thing about the lower HDD cage is that hard-disks are placed inside vertically, on tiny pieces of silicon, which does seem strange, but also provides better cooling. The case is roomy enough to provide painless component installation, and any need for tools is down to a minimum. Before closing the case, make sure to check that all fans are set to "low", because sometimes it happens that some of the fans are set to "medium", which is in most cases unnecessary and only makes more noise.
When everything is set up and working, we have ourselves an uncompromisingly cool and silent system. The chassis was manufactured in three layers to minimize noise as far as possible, whereas the fans are big enough to create a large airflow even on the lowest RPM rate. All in all, a very expensive case, but one that provides the maximum for the amount of money invested. An ideal enclosure for servers and users that require their system to be minimally warm and maximally reliable. And have cables that are long enough as well :-)
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