Antec Solo II Mid Tower Chassis Review

With some products on the market, our initial thoughts about its design and functionality can be made wrong. The Antec Solo II is certainly one that has made a surprise. Its clear that a lot of thought has gone into the functionality and performance of the case. When it was taken out of the box for the first time, my initial thoughts went back to when this type of chassis layout was the standard and the result of that meant that cable management was not as easy to control as it is in general today, especially as there is no space behind the motherboard to hide anything.  Antec must have foreseen this thought and the solution that they have devised is one of the most effective that I have seen in a while, everything just flows in a neat loop in and out and others easily run up and around the loops provided.

As far as the sound resonance from the case, well with all fans up on max and the hard drive spinning away, there was very little vibration felt on the desk and this is all down to the soft silicone mountings that have been included and the option to suspend your hard drives in elastic fixed to the sides of the drive bays. The sound deadening on the two side panels albeit only there, also add that little bit extra to reducing acoustic noise from the inside and this is more reflected by running with the sides off and then with them on. Even though it is not pictured in our installation above we did further test the included TrueQuiet 120mm fan, and yet again I was impressed that even on its high setting, it still spun at near silence whilst still having a reasonable amount of throughput.

For anyone who is looking for a stylish case to quietly run their system in and is not mad about having all the usual features of loads of fans and grills and expansion in every corner, then for £91.92, you really cant go wrong. if you have previously looked at this case and have thought the same as I did when I first saw it with regards to keeping everything tidy inside, then hopefully this insight will make you give the Solo II another consideration in your choice if not the choice to make.

Its not always the mad and feature packed cases that tick all the right boxes for us as it ultimately depends on what environment the system is to be run in and more importantly, what the system is going to be used for. There is no point in having a huge case with every fan possible packed into it if you are looking for a home office pc and likewise looking at a small-mid tower chassis for running a very high performance system in that requires huge water cooling setups.  So where would this case lie in the spectrum? Well we cant rule it out of the gaming side completely as its allowance for larger GPUs means that even at an entry level, there is still the market there.  Where I see this being more is with the more office or contemporary office environment where the balance between style, looks and quiet performance means that it not only fits in (or stands out – which ever way you prefer to look at it) with its surroundings but its near silent running will not intrude on the user during use.