Antec 1200 V3 Case
review by
snipekill2445
The Antec 1200 is a full tower air cooling oriented case from Antec. It is built very well from high quality materials and has plenty of space inside for your build. It supports more than nine hard drives out of the box, enough for anyone I'm sure. It does have little cable management space and has poor watercooling support.
Looking at the packaging we see a picture of the the front/top of the case against a dark background, 200mm fan shining away. USB3.0 and SSD support printing on the front of the box. On the side of the box we see another picture of the case on a different angle with bullet points showing key features that this case offers. On the back of the box we find more pictures of the case along with specifications in various different languages.
In the box we see the case packaged inside thick soft foam protecting it during transit. I like seeing soft foam as it holds up better to impact better than it's hard foam counterpart. There is a very informative case manual and opening the case we find the many accessories included with the case, including a 3.5" to 2.5" SSD bracket and various screws and standoffs. I prefer the different screws and standoffs to be packaged in their own plastic bags as it's easier to keep track of them.
For the aircooler, this is an excellent case. With six included fans five of which being 120mm and a single top 200mm out of the box it gets a very good stream of airflow to keep your components cool. The fans are high quality Antec tri-speed fans sporting bright blue LEDs, with only the top 200mm fan have control of the LED being turned on and off. I'd have liked to see all fans with LED control, as it can be overly bright in dark room.
There is almost no support for water cooling, both custom loops and closed loop coolers, these days that is a big disadvantage. However unlike alot of modern cases it is built extremely well out of strong quality material. It's basically a tank of a case. You can stuff nine hard drives out of the box into this thing making is great as a server case, the hard drives are mounted pointing towards the three front 120mm fans giving them ample cooling. The three hard drive bays containing three hard drive mounts each, are removable and must be removed to clean the dust filters in front of each fan. I found this troublesome as there are eight screws holding each bay inside of the case, making filter cleaning a time consuming task. There is a a single extra fan mount attached to one of the hard drive bays allowing for further internal cooling.
We can see seven expansion slots on the back of the case supporting regular size ATX motherboards. This case uses a bottom mounted power supply and has no fan cutout on the bottom of the case restricting it to be mounted right side up. I'd like to see a fan cutout so the power supply can be mounted upside down with access to fresh air from outside the case.
On the window side of the case we have another 120mm fan mount with removable fan filter. I'd prefer to have a complete side window over a partial window with fan mount.
Building a system in this case is quite easy. The hard drives do not use a screwless design which I don't mind as I like the idea of a securely mounted hard drive, being a fragile device.
There is ample space for mounting the power supply to the bottom of the case, though space on the rear of the motherboard is quite restricted making for difficult cable routing.
The top 200mm fan extends outside of the case, so there is no issue for tall motherboard vrm cooling clearance.
Using this case I noticed significantly lower processor and graphics card temperatures, along with the hard drives and vrms due to the fantastic air cooling capabilities of the case. Very cool, pun intended.
Overall I very much like this case. For aircooling it is in a league of it's own, but watercooling support leaves something to be desired. I like that the case is built from mostly steel with few parts of the case made of plastic, as this gives it a very solid feel. If you're an aircooler who needs a case with amazing airflow, and will not be using watercooling in the future, I'd recommend the Antec 1200.
Pros | Cons |
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Decent amount of real estate, support for more than nine hard drives, six included fans. | Air filters are diffucult to remove, poor much cable management space. |
Ratings