Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best I've ever seen, 27 Feb 2009
ANTEC P182 EU PC CASE BLACK
I've been building PCs for the better part of 25 years and I have to say that this is the best case I've ever come across, bar none.
I decided that it was time to pension off my old Chieftec floor standing server case in favour of a smaller, easier to maintain desktop tower and having been impressed by the reviews of this case by so many sites whose opinions I trust and respect, decided to try it.
The first thing I was impressed with, after having unpacked it from the well constructed packaging, was the way it seems to exude quality. The panels are unlike anything I've seen before having been designed as a laminate. I'm not a person given to venting frustration on inanimate equipment but even so, the build quality of this case would lead me to believe that it is capable of handling the installation skills of a stroppy gorilla without suffering damage. It's all but bomb-proof.
Externally, and I know this is necessarily subjective, I think this case looks magnificent.
Internally, it is certainly more than big enough to cater for all my needs although I suspect that those with really long graphics cards might need to take care. I transferred my 1000w Akasa PSU and found that it fitted with no problem and better still, the long cables enabled me to easily route the power cables around the opposite side panel as suggested, making a very neat installation and reducing to a minimum any reduction in air flow caused by the usual "bird's nest".
Overall, installation of all the hardware went wonderfully well, even the legacy floppy drive in the slightly fiddly enclosure. The HDD cradles seem to work very well and the non rigid suspension works perfectly.
In use, this case has the fans set to low under normal circumstances and, even so, keeps my components perfectly cool and at a noise level such as to require me to physically confirm that the PC is switched on, even against the acoustic background of a very quiet home office environment.
Heavy (for me) gaming is adequately handled by the supplied fans on medium setting and this still results in less noise with the case sitting on the desktop, than my server tower produced being hidden away behind a cupboard door at floor level.
I'm not given to superlative but in this instance I can see no reason to give the P182 any less than a maximum rating.
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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Good concept, poor implementation, 3 Sep 2008
The so-called Super Advanced Mini Tower, despite receiving awards and great reviews from a variety of independent sites, is actually rather poor.
It has some great concepts - a dual air chamber with the power supply and hard drives at the bottom, and the rest of the PC separate above barring cables, built-in exhaust out of the top of the PC, easily removable hard drive bays.
What really marrs this otherwise great case is that all of these great concepts don't work properly. The separate power supply chamber has a central support that cannot be removed, with a fan on it. This fan is the only way to move air through the chamber, but must be removed to fit almost any power supply. Large power supplies will probably not fit at all. The lack of a fan means that your power supply had best move some air or your hard drives will overheat.
Worse, if you can fit your power supply, you may find that the cables simply do not reach, given the usual expectation of the motherboard and power supply being much closer. Antec have at least provided decent wiring support in that you can route wires around the back of the PC as well as over the front, which I found to be a necessity to allow the 12V CPU power connection.
The fans that exhaust heat in the main chamber are screwed directly to the frame, with linked speed controls screwed into the chassis. The top fan isn't even properly screwed in, it has two screws and two clips, making it impossible to replace with any other mounting. The fans are awful, and you'll want to replace them if you value your quiet PC, yet the case makes this awkward to impossible.
The removable hard drive bays are great, but the equivalent cage for a floppy disk is fixed, and almost impossible to get at. Finally, for reasons that are a mystery, Antec opted to have a swing door on the front of the case, that obscures the power button, and is fragile & easily bent or broken unless you're careful. A normal fronting would have been far more sturdy.
Finally, simply put, the case is too small. The upper removable hard drive bay has to be removed to accommodate almost any modern graphics card, and with a full size ATX motherboard, you'll find yourself scraping and cursing (and probably bleeding) to get everything to fit. Though I don't personally own one, I'd imagine that the taller tower-style heatsinks that are popular with the newer processors would struggle to fit.
All in all, some great ideas, and if you are going for a low power micro ATX PC, you'll have no trouble, but I'd not recommend it for a normal modern ATX-based PC.
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
You can put bit's in it., 18 Aug 2008
This is a physically large case and is a comparatively easy build,
Cable routing and tidying is well catered for and the internal compartmentalization seems like a good thing. In practice though the case is not actually much quieter or cooler than a regular steel case. Generally construction is good but not up to the standards Antec maintained just a few years ago.
Sharp edges: there are too many inside the case - take care or visit casualty for a few stitches.
Removing the steel filler plates from the case was awkward and fitting a floppy drive an exercise in frustration, and freeing hemoglobin. The floppy bay is low on the case if you sit at a desk with the case on the floor it's awkward to access. In the end I got a card-reader that fitted in a 5.25" bay.
The spring rails used to mount optical drives are lighter, and brittle compared to those used in the Sonata 1. In the original Sonata spare rails were clipped into the 5.25" bay blanks for storage. Why was such a good idea not carried into the P182?
Removing fan filters - opening a door to access the filters is a good idea but they ain't all that easy to remove. You can't get a finger around the edge and they seem a bit fragile. Vacuum in place ? Risky.
My main gripe though is the hinge and grill system on the front. It's plastic and not very robust. It's easily broken while open. This isn't actually a bad case, but it just makes 3 stars in my opinion.
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