A Closer Look – Interior
Now that we’ve got the side panel window off to one side, you can see there’s plenty of room in here. In fact, it’s more room than I expected for a Micro-ATX chassis. Of course, that’s thanks to the fact the HDD bays are all hidden out of the way, allowing for longer GPUs to be installed with ease.
The PSU shroud is basic but gets the job done by hiding all your unsightly cables out of the way. There’s a small cutout for routing basic motherboard cables too. Furthermore, a larger cutout near the front frees up space for front radiators.
In the front, there are no pre-installed fans, unfortunately. Of course, you can add your own, and even a 240mm radiator will fit, limited to 55mm thick including the fan.
In the rear, you’ll find that 120mm fan. It uses a standard 3-pin header, so that’s easy enough. Obviously, mATX, you’ll find four slots at the back, more than enough for a GPU or similar add-in cards.
Behind the Motherboard
There’s a reasonable amount of space to handle excess cables here. Of course, the PSU cover will allow you to cram any excess out of the way should you need to. Two 3.5″ HDDs can be screwed directly to the chassis towards the front, keeping them out of the way.
There are two t0ol-free 3.5″ drive mounts in the base, with support for 2.5″ drives using the included screws.
A nice bonus, two dedicated 2.5″ mounts with removable brackets are located behind the motherboard. That gives us six hard drive mounts in total, which is great for such a small chassis.
Hi Peter, thanks for your detailed review. I’ve got a couple of questions that I’m hoping you’ve got answers to:
1. If you wanted to fit 2x120mm/140mm fans between the front cover and the chassis shell, so that I can fit just a 240mm/280mm AIO before the PSU shroud, could you? This is because most radiator+fan thicknesses exceed the specified 55mm, and I thought sticking the fans on the outside might be doable, since there is a bit of a ‘well’ for the fans to sit in, no?
and
2. Since there is the option to fit 3x120mm or 2x140mm fans up top, why wouldn’t it be feasible to fit a 240mm/280mm AIO, seeing as there shouldn’t be any chance of interfering with the rear 120mm fan, and there aren’t any 5.25″ bays to hamper such installation? The only reason I can think of is that any radiator would collide with the top of any mobo VRM heatsinks.
Sorry to trouble you, but I’ve reached out to Antec a couple of times, and not heard a word back, sooo…