Antec NSK3300: Quiet Out-of-the-Box

July 27, 2006 by Devon Cooke

Over the last few years, Antec has steadily been building a market for quiet-oriented cases. Antec's collaboration with Mike Chin, editor of SPCR, to build the P180 and, more recently, the NSK2400 and the Fusion HTPC cases, is part of this effort, but their noise-centric efforts go beyond a couple of joint products. The Antec Sonata was the first to be marketed as quiet case as far back as early 2003, and, more recently, the P150 / Solo brought an effective drive suspension system to the masses.

The NSK3300 continues this effort. It uses the dual-chamber design from the P180 jammed into a box that's the size of a bottom-of-the-line granny computer from Dell or HP. Just to make this perfectly clear, the case is just 14" tall, substantially smaller than the 17'~19" height of typical mid-towers. There's hardly a desk it won't fit under.

It also lops off a third of the price and includes a "high efficiency" power supply in the bargain. It's Micro-ATX only — if you need space for six expansion cards, SLI, or the cutting edge, top-of-the-line motherboards, the NSK3300 probably isn't for you. On the other hand, fully featured Micro-ATX boards are easy to come by these days, so it should be perfectly capable of housing components for mainstream users.

A surprisingly big box for such a small case.

The NSK3300 showed up in a retail box stuffed to the gills with packing material. In between the two recycled cardboard ends was enough foam to make a small mattress. There should be no concerns about shipping damage unless UPS decides to run it through with a forklift.

Packing material everywhere.