Antec Three Hundred Midi Case

The bad:

The fans are not silent. I haven't bothered with anything but low setting. The panels are a little prone to vibration. You do not get a firewire port on the front panel. You do not get an external 3.5 bay. The motherboard panel does not have any holes in for cable management.

The good:

I fitted a Corsair 750 watt PSU in the bottom, then above it a Gigabyte ATX motherboard with a large Scythe Mugen CPU cooler, 2 hard drives in reverse to hide the cables in the lower front, a DVD writer and a blu-ray drive above them, an ATI 4890 graphics card and a sound card in the motherboard slots, & a case fan directed at the graphics card. Everything fitted with a slot to spare in between it and another component. The build was straightforward. The cables ran well to each component and did not clutter. The build was functional but not as attractively placed as other cases allow. *A short power connector for the top of the motherboard would need extending*. The air flow was good and although they weren't the coolest at idle they didn't rise by much when put under load or when over clocking and I could not detect any hot spots. The case is very simple with a pin sized hard disk and power lights. You get plenty of thumb screws for components you may remove and plenty of standard screws as well.

All in all the case is a very functional basic case with plenty of options for someone who enjoys building an understated but well made computer. I've built and modded a computers before this. Non of them went as straightforward as this one. I may use more expensive cases in the future, but I wouldn't look beyond this one for a budget case. I have some Noctua fans on order, but that is all I am looking into to alter the way my computer now runs. The amount of tweaking I usually do with my systems only looking at fans with this one is a good sign.

The thing i really like about this case is that it dosent look like other gaming cases which imo all look tacky with their weird unintuitive shapes and odd layouts etc, this case bridges the gap between looks and functionality. This could easily pass as a sleek office computer.

PROS:

- Multiple 120mm fan mounts, there are 2x front 1x side 1x rear and 1x top fan which is 140mm. The case itsself comes with the top fan and a rear fan.

- Easy to use, yeah how does that apply to something that dosent really get "used"... well opening the case up for maintenance, turning it on, cable management are all a breeze with this. My old antec P180 was a bit of a PITA to be honest, opening the door to get to the on button, USB ports etc halfway down the case and the door would disrupt the cables anyway etc. With this case its all placed at the top, where it should be, and theres no door :)

- Screwless design, kind of. I dont think there are any truely screwless cases but this one comes close, there are a bunch of thumb screws supplied to use with internal HDD's and DVD drives etc, ive used them wherever i could to make maintenance easier.

- Bottom mounted PSU, this is better for airflow and although it probably never happens the risk of the PSU falling down and smacking the graphics cards etc on the way down is removed :P That would only really apply to people with butterfingers though as generally they dont fall down on their own

- Price, for the price you get a functional product that does what it does well! Used to be you had to take a chance with cases or splash out for something like the P180 which i mentioned before irked me a bit anyways. With this case theres no gamble, its cheap, its solidly built, functional and fit for gaming, SLI rigs, a workstation etc. Very good buy.

CONS:

- No 3.5" drive bay. Noone uses floppys anymore, thank god, but there are quite a lot of people who use card readers, it wouldve been nice to have a space for one to fit in. I just got myself a cheap 3.5" to 5.25" bracket and stuck the card reader in a spare 5.25" slot, easy enough to do but its still worth noting there is no 3.5" bay.

Overall a very good case. If you need a high quality case for gaming or indeed anything this is definately one to consider, as i said before this wouldnt look out of place in an office space.

What can I say? I'll start with the awesome cooling. It's got room for 5 fans. It comes with a 140mm tri speed fan in the roof and a 120mm fan at the rear. You can fit 2x 120mm fans at the front and a 12mm at the side. Also to make the cooling even better, the front is made of a metal mesh.

People have said that it looks quite dull but I like it. It looks really good with two LED fans in the front.

On the right side, there's a small bay to store wires so you can make the inside look neater.

The PSU is located at the bottom in this case. This helps the airflow and I've found that the CPU says really cool on this PC because of this, since the layout means that it's directly in between the roof and rear fan.

My only problem is that it don't have a 3.5" drive bay but in order to have the 2 front fans and 3 5.25" bay this is a necessary sacrifice.