Antec ISK 310-150 Mini-ITX Review

Complete System

Building inside this chassis is certainly a tight fit, the motherboard drops right into place with relative ease, but don’t expect an easy task when it comes to routing the required power cables, as you’re going to need a little patience and nimble fingers. The USB 3.0 cable is especially tricky and as you can see, the cables may cause more headaches for those using a small expansion card. It’s not impossible, but it is pretty tight overall, so take your time with the build.

The slim design of the chassis does limit you to low-profile or stock CPU coolers. You’ll also need to take advantage of a few cable ties to prevent any cables from moving and getting stuck in the fans within the chassis, but again, this isn’t the hardest task in the world and keeping cables out of the way will also help with airflow.

As I was saying, routing those cables is hard work, so small expansion cards will only add to the issues, perhaps Antec should have used a shorter or flat-cable USB 3.0 connector to make this easier.

There are quite a few cables here, but there’s still enough room to allow air to pass through the PSU near the front.

The hard drive trays are easy enough to work with, just remove the bracket, screw your drives into place and remount the tray. Some tool-free clips would have been nice, but it’s unlikely you’ll need to swap drives that often in a chassis of this type anyway.

All panels back in place and the chassis mounted on the vertical mount, and it certainly looks cool. This setup is certainly beneficial to having the chassis on top of your desk, as it’ll free up some space for other desktop hardware. Of course, if you’re using this as an HTPC, it may look better horizontal, the choice is yours.