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tmorita
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Rating:  8
Time with product: 2
Strengths: Quiet, Cable management, Sturdy
Weaknesses: PSU chamber needs more room, especially for larger PSUs
Summary: With the power supply located at the bottom, it helps reduce turbulence to lower noise from the PSU fan. And with grommets in the hard drive cages, the vibration from the hard drives is reduced, together making the case very quiet overall.Being able to route the PSU cables behind the motherboard tray is a nice touch and makes the cables organized, but it could use a bit more room especially for fatter cables.The toughest part was getting the PSU into the PSU chamber. I had to temporarily remove the fan that sits in the lower chamber between the PSU and the hard drive cage to insert the PSU (I have a 750W PC P&C). Omitting this fan is not really an option for me since it sucks air into the case to cool the hard drives and expel it out the PSU.Before buying this case, I would check around to see what PSUs others have successfully been able to install.
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gman757
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Rating: 8
Time with product: 1 Month
Strengths: Well thought out design. Silenced my hard drives. Behind-the-scenes cable routing helps with airflow.
Weaknesses: Expensive. Not as quiet has I hoped. Need newer PSU with long power cables. Tricky installation. Have to open front door to turn on computer.
Summary: I upgraded to this case mainly to try to quiet my system, and secondly to help with cooling. While it did help with both, it wasn't as good as I was expecting. First, the hard drive cages are awesome for quieting your hard drives. The rubber grommets make all the difference. I have 2 Western Digital Raptors which are super-noisy, but after mounting them in this case, they are barely noticable. My Seagate 7200.9 is now silent. Also, they are mounted out of the way, in the same compartment as the PSU on the bottom of the case. This clears up clutter and gives the drives dedicated airflow. The bad news is that the other hard drive cage is in the way of my graphics card (nVidia 8800GTX), so I had to take the hard drive mounts out (but not the cage itself). I had a similar problem on my last case too, so it's not totally Antec's fault. The next thing that makes this case so great is the ability to route most power cables behind the motherboard. This helps immensely with airflow. I even got the huge 24-pin mobo cable to fit behind. On the minus side, you need a newer PSU with very long cables for this to work. Even with a new PSU, I couldn't get one of the 8-pin mobo cables to reach behind, and it barely fit the normal way. Getting all the cables to fit the way you want takes a bit of planning and trial-and-error to get right. Also, my PSU had to be shoe-horned into place. It was just a tad to big for the space Antec left for it (didn't have that problem with my older case). The biggest complaint I have is that my computer isn't really much quieter. The panels are designed to quiet sound, the case is solid, so what's the problem? Well, it's the fan placement. There is a huge fan on top of the case, and while the fan itself is quiet, this gaping hole allows the noise created by my CPU cooler (Zalman 9700) to escape out the top. If I block this hole with something (like a book), the case is much quieter. But obviously this would hurt the cooling properties of the case long term. Also, it's a bit expensive. I feel it's worth about $100, but you can't find it for that cheap unless you get a good sale or rebate.
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grc1056
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Rating: 8
Time with product:
Strengths: Heavy duty, well made, nice silver and black look. Plenty of space, and excellent attention to detail.
Weaknesses: A bit pricey.
Summary: Excellent product, strongly made for long lasting computing. Cable management most doable, but studying your available componets, and working the cable routing slowing to better hide applicable wire to enhance computer venting and cooling of your video cards and various componets. If using more than two hard drives and two CD ROMs, and one floppy drive the case will become a bit full. If building it new, you might be better off buying as many OEM products as possible. While my motherboard and hard drive can with applicable SATA cables, after installing all the four drives and floppy drive, I would have been better off buying special lenght cables that would have served me better.
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pfalcon
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Rating: 8
Time with product: 7 Days
Strengths: A lot of room, sturdy, nice finish, good cooling, quiet
Weaknesses: No eSATA connector, not aluminum = heavy, poor component alignment
Summary: Overall very good case. The real complain though is that quality is not what Antec used to be. PSU bracket is about 1-2mm to narrow/shallow. Drive bays and other case components are poorly aligned, you have to push and press here and there to make screws fit properly.
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rwindsurf
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Rating: 8
Time with product: 2 Weeks
Strengths: 3 stock cooling fans with variable speed controls, very quiet with fans on low setting, easy to run wiring behind motherboard allowing better air flow from front to back
Weaknesses: middle accessory fan will not fit if you install the Geforce 8800 GTX graphics card (it's too long)
Summary: It would have been nice for the three stock fans to come with an optional connector directly to the motherboard to allow automatic speed control (currently they only have molex connectors). I purchased three Antec 120mm fans for this case which all came with the accessory plugs for monitoring fan speed at least.
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9.1
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