According to the article all the cases and power supplies in the room were pre-production models. And if they were showing a Phantom 500, it is not surprising it would be oversized.

damnit i want this case now.. best start saving for the customs charge, as there's no way i can wait for it to arrive in the shops in the UK

With the exchange rate what it is right now, why not just fly over and pick one up for yourself?

But I'd suggest waiting for a review. There's gotta be some gotchas. This is Antec, after all, and their past performance has not been stellar. Good more times than not, granted, but never stellar.

The Phantom 500 is a hybrid passive/active PSU whose fan only kicks on in the clutch, and yes, it is deeper than the standard Phantom 350.

-Ed

I love the psu/central fan/hard drive duct. They can put it in more of their cases. As soon as I saw that I thought "no fan in the psu". Now if case manufacturers would only make the hdd drive cages convertible between 3.5" and 5.25" so I can use stretchy cord without modding, I'd be happy.

To the member who expected BTX, forget it. Anand's report from CES said there was only one micro-BTX board shown, and the board manufacturers had no plans for BTX this year. It may never appear.

Amen to that!

Even Intel, who are the only people, anywhere, pushing for BTX, have said that they only expect BTX to reach 50% market penetration by 2007, and that they foresee producing ATX boards for as long as the market demands them.

AMD's sorta unspoken stand on BTX seems to be, "we'll go that route only if the market makes us, but we really don't want to" BTX is, not surprisingly, very unfriendly to people who want to design motherboards for CPU's with on-die memory controllers. (A BTX-world would help Intel out of their thermal jam they put themselves in, while simultaineously making AMD64 motherboards more complicated, and thus more expensive...gee, I wonder who's idea that was? )

That lower HDD/FAN/PSU duct has me planning on some more extreme PSU mods. Removing not only the fan but the entire metal enclosure (except that required for mounting) should certainly help airflow; and having it in the seperate space shakes my fears of EMI affecting the rest of the system. All I'd do is be sure to insulate the duct around the drive so nothing shorts to the chassis

I dunno... just call it "an electrified anti-theft device."

does anyone know for sure what the materials of this case is? not the panels... i know thats a combo of aluminum and plastic.

i know this is a performance line case so i'm guessing the whole thing is going to be aluminum but looking at the pictures, it looks like metal. i hope antec is using thick aluminum throughout.

It's pretty hefty steel. The only aluminum is in the sandwiched composite panels.

The rest of the chassis is steel.

You want the rest of the chassis to be steel, trust me.

Why would you want it to be aluminum?

This is not going to be a lightweight case...nice. Reminds me of my old all-chrome beast...

so does that mean the p160 is also metal on the inside?

i thought the point of wanting a high end aluminum case is for heat dissipation. noticed most reviews of aluminum cases make it a point to note that. slightly confused at the moment...

Myth. Lie. Pure drivel. The thermal delta between a machine housed in a steel enclosure and an enclosure housed in a steel enclosure amounts to mere fractions of a single degree Centigrade.

-Ed

Im confused. Why would you want a fan down there? The PSU is a fanless design, having a fan would kind of negate its purpose, would it not?

Also with the Phantom and the SilentMaxx a fan would be rather useless since there is no space for the air to go. With the Phantom its so tightly packed there will be virtually no airflow thru it and with the Silentmaxx there will be zero air flow, all you will be doing is creating a compression chamber.

There are vent holes on the back of the P180, completely surrounding the PSU mounting location, so that the 120mm fan in the channel will create an airstream over all 4 sides of a fanless PSU such as the Phantom.



No compression chamber, just a happy fanless PSU.

I dunno rusty, pretty dumb unless the PSU can be mounted upside down to get all those fuggin cables out of the way and closer to the motherboard.

WRT why have a fanless PSU in a fanned case *shrug*. Your fan is smack dab in the middle of the case which is a great place for a fan to be heh. Maybe its like people buying PC 5300 DDR for A64 setups @ 200-233 FSB. If you have a PSU fan cooling 2 HDDs up front it should be enough airflow anyway. So many options.... hurry up antech.

Oh ok, good call, I hadn't seen that photo yet.

But again I wonder, why put a fan there... Its a fanless PSU, the added noise of a fan to cool the closed chamber seems counter productive. If you want to put HDs down there and are concerned with cooling them, you'd be better off with a fanned PSU and skip that 120 in the middle. The less fans the better, no matter how you slice it.

One thing on the fan placement. This is a pre-production unit, things like that can be changed before it goes into production.


Tay why would you want the PSU flipped upside down? If the cables aren't long enough you could buy an extender. Antec may even include one with the case.

Considering this case has superdamped panels on both sides, the roof and out front, and that fan is mounted in the middle of that tunnel, far from the front intake and the rear exhaust, do you honestly think that, running something like a Nexus 120 at 5 or 7V, you'd still even hear it?

-Ed

We won't know that until Mike tells us.
But it is possible, the back isn't dampened so the noise could slip out there quite well.

Have you ever even used a Nexus 120 at 7V? A Nexus 120 at ~600rpm is very nearly impossible to hear, even mounted right to a case exhaust!

Well as Ed and I said, middle of the case is a good place to have a fan for noise. WRT PSU i was thinking that the cables would be then at the top left (where they should be) if it was flipped, rather than the bottom right. It would be better for airflow and cable length, especially when pushing air through a passive unit although I may be nitpicking. And think of all the problems for the cable clutter adddicted folks *looks at ralf*.

Yeah they are very nice, and very very quiet, but they also don't move much air. In that situation if I wanted to get some sort of significant air flow to cool my HD's and blow some air over the PSU I'd probably go with something else and then it would be more loud.

tay, the PSU can be mounted upside down. There is a picture and a comment earlier in this thread showing that.

I think the points made about the 120mm fan in the PSU being redundant are for "us" very true. I don't think many SPCR'ers would mount an expensive fanless PSU, and then put a fan 2" in front of it. It would make more sense just to use one of the many quiet fanned PSU's down there, and omit the 120mm altogether. That would let the PSU fan draw air in across the HDD's and out the back. And for the HDD setups that most of "us" use, that is plenty of airflow.

But....

Antec isn't aiming this case at just "us", the Silent Crowd. They're also marketing it at the performance-at-all-costs crowd. And they're much more likely to throw a 200CFM Delta in there, to keep their 4 RAID'd Raptors and their 900watt PSU cool.

Having all the fan locations just gives you more options, it doesn't mean you have to put a fan in each spot. The most likely SPCR configuration is probably no fan in the bottom, no fans in the intakes, and maybe one exhaust fan in the upper compartment.

I actually feel sorry for whichever one of us gets to review this thing...just think of all the fan configurations they're going to have to test to make the readers happy.

*Looks at Ralf*

have you got any idea how long we will have to wait for them get a finnished case out for review or sale ?

If you are talking about the dual G5 towers then you are way off. Where do you think swifty got the new mcp350? I dont know of any other large Mac cooling solutions so if you arent talking about the G5 forgive me.

With this in mind, I'd like to throw out my ideal configuration (for consideration while testing).

For Sure:
Single Samsung suspended with Zalman heatpipe cooler in middle of duct
Nexus PSU
NCU-2000 CPU cooler aligned for vertical airflow
Nexus 120mm exhaust fan mounted to top vent
90nm A64 3200+
nForce4 Board
Gigabyte nVidia 6800 Fanless

Likely:
Acoustipack the inside of the HDD/PSU duct
mCubed T-Balancer

Maybe:
Additional 120mm Nexus suspended/ducted for 6800

Thoughts?