Antec P101 Silent Mid-Tower Case Review – No Glass or RGB Here!

Peter Donnell / 4 years ago

Interior

Both side panels on this case are pretty sturdy, and both come with a nice and thick layer of noise dampening material applied to them. This will help reduce a lot of noise from the case, but also works wonders for reducing smaller vibrations too.

The interior of the case looks fantastic, it’s actually a little tragic that it’s hidden behind a solid panel. However, this case is very heavily focused on usability not aesthetics.

You get a metal PSU shroud, keeping all your excess cable routing of the way to improve airflow in the case. There are a couple of cable routing holes here too, so you can reach the bottom of the motherboard easily.

All of the expansion slot covers are fitted with reusable metal covers. No thumbscrews here either which is odd, however, has anyone ever been able to use their thumbs to undo those screws? Didn’t think so.

The rear exhaust fan is the black/white design as those in the front. However, this one is a 140mm model unlike the front panels 120mm fans.

The motherboard tray is finished in white (obviously), and comes equipped with loads of cable routing cut-outs to ensure a smooth build process. There’s also an extra-wide CPU cooler mounting cut-out, as this case will support E-ATX motherboards, and that includes dual socket motherboards.

There’s a 5.25″ drive bay. No seriously, there is! I haven’t seen one of those in a very long time.

Another throwback to how we used to do things are the HDD bays. They’re in the front of the case here not hidden out of sight. Of course, this isn’t a “gaming” PC case that only has a handful of mounts. It’s meant for more serious applications so it has a lot of drive mounts. Some here.

Even more bellow that.

And they keep on coming.

And down here too. They’re all mounted in blocks of two, and all the bays are fully removable if you so desire. Removing them would free up space for big radiators in the front if you wanted to go down that route.

All the trays are tool-free plastic trays too, so just squeeze the sides and give them a light pull.

There are tool-free mounts for 3.5″ drives, but there are screws included for 2.5″ drives too.

There’s even some anti-vibration rubber mounts on the sides.

Behind the motherboard, you’ll find quite a lot of cable routing room. I mean, with all those HDD bays, you’ll need it!

All of the HDD bays are mounted using four large thumbscrews, so they are fairly easy to remove and move around when you need to.

There are cable routing holes placed just behind each bay too.

There are a few Velcro straps, but there are also a bunch of cable tie-down loops dotted around the case. There are fan headers here, allowing you to hook everything to that front panel fan control switch.

The power comes from a Molex header, which is a bit old-school. However, given you may have a lot of SATA drives in this case, you may not have the extra SATA header for this, so Molex actually seems a wise choice (for once).