P182 - owner thoughts?

The P180/2 is an awesome case and well worth it. I was able to fit in 3 front intake fans and 2 exhaust fans. Only used 2 intake though. Here is a pic of my old P180 painted black:


There is a lot you can do with this case. The TRUE fits in it just fine even with the 4870, as shown above. GPU idled around 51C with fan at 35% and loaded at about 68C, which is great in this case. Also, the CPU fan was louder than the 4870 fan at 35% when I used this case. So you should be able to turn it up a little, and with sound proofing you may be able to set 40% and not hear it. At 37% fan speed I started to hear it though

I've got all four standard standard case fan mounts filled, plus a fifth 120mm fan in a Sycthe Kama Bay. All five fans are antec Tr-Cools (I buy spares from endpcnoise.com for $6.95 each). I also have a Nexus BeamAir installed in on the Kama Bay fan, it works as advertised. I left the fan filters intact, but removed the doors over them.

With the intakes on high and the exhausts on medium, this is enough to satsifactorily cool a 4GHz i7 920, an OCed GTX 260, and four harddrives. If I back off to 3.6GHz, I can remove the fan from my TRUE and passively cool my i7 with the same configuration.

There is a noticeable level of noise from the air turbulence with five 120mm fans all pushing 50-80 cfm. However it's a low woosh, fading into the background well, and not very bothersome.

All in all, I'm quite happy with the P182. It's fairly easy to work with, cooling is good (though it's certainly beaten by the 900 and 1200), cable management is excellent, and it's extremely sturdy. The panels are also three layers, so deaden noise well compared to most cases. Filtered intakes are quite helpful.

The donwsides are that the case is heavy, it doesn't accomodate large graphics cards without removing the middle drive bay (easy to do and won't be an issue unless you have more than four harddrives), and the front door hinges feel kinda flimsy without modification (I put some hot glue around the top and bottom hinges, feels much better now).

I'll start off by saying that I love my P182. I think it's the best case I have owned. I have had the Antec 900, Asus Vento 7700, Asus Vento 3600, CoolerMaster Mystique, and RaidMax Ares...and of all of them - I love my P182 the best.

The only catch to running a bigger card like the 4870 in the P182 is that you sacrafice the use of one of the optional fans. The middle HDD rack (which is the black one in the middle of this pic) has an optional fan that mounts at the rear of the cage (basically - it would blow directly on your GPU's. When I had my 8800GS SLI setup - I had it installed - but you can see from this picture that my 9800GTX comes right up to the cage so you can't install the fan.

I know a lot of folks just simply remove that cage altogether...but I kind of like having it because I can hide all of my wires back there.

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Oh wow, tri cools for 7 bucks. I'm glad you found that and plus rep to you for that. I was about to pay 20 bucks for another tricool. Thanks for putting that up there.

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If you want to put a fan in the middle HDD cage you can set up a 10cm (100mm) fan inside the cage close to the edge, but not in the way of the GPU power cables. Ghetto, but it will work, and no one would ever see it as it would be hidden from plain view . I thought about doing that before, but never did it.

I have 2 threads in my sig on some of the things I have done to my P180 over the years

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Not a bad idea. I thought about doing something like that before - but figrued an 80mm was too small and a 120mm was to big....don't know why I didn't think of a 100mm one.

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Yes it is in a bad spot. Which is why I moved mine to the front of the lower HDD chamber. But by doign that I was unable to screw the chamber back in as I had to remove the piece it screws in to. At the same time I had cool air blowing right on to my hard drives

So - in summary, it's pretty awesome, but get 3 120mm Yates and a 1 100mm Yate, and watch the temps?

It seems to meet the requirements of airflow and silence pretty well, without all those LED fans I have at the moment.

The bottom cage has a minor design flaw in that although it's able to accommodate 3 HD the 120mm fan is on the wrong side and so doesn't pull much air into the case. This fan should be replaced with a 100mm fan at the front of the cage?

Does the installation of the 100mm fan require any mechanical mucking about? I don't have myself a dremel etc. and I'm loathe to start cutting cases up. I'm more of a buy and build kinda guy

Thanks to all for the replies, +rep all round.

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I disagree.

The bottom fan works fine for me and keeps my four drives between 35 and 45C in 20-30C ambients.

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I find that it works quite well, actually, even with 4 drives.







Other images:

Wow, now that's the kind of detail I need.

So the bottom fan has a fairly well sealed "air tunnel" from the front of the case? I mean, how well sealed is the bottom HD cage, and is it a well formed wind tunnel?

Another round of +1. I think this might be the case for me...

Also - who still uses the default fans? Did you replace them with new fans, and if so did you choose overpowerful ones that were then limited with a fan controller?

It can get -HOT- in here during the summer. Would ike to avoid BSOD

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There are gaps in the air tunnel, but that's what the masking tape is for. Actually, there is a black peice of pastic that seals it of pretty well (you can see it int he stock images of the case at newegg or antec's stie), but I broke mine, and tape works just as well, if not better. With the peice isntalled the seal is far from perfect, but it's plenty good enough.

I use the stock fans. I actually bough 7 more of them to add a few extras and have spares (they are only $7 each). They have by far the best airflow/price/relaibility/noise ratio of any fans that I've used. They aren't perfect, or the best in any category, but the Antec Tri-cool is a very good all-round fan.

I do my stress testing in 30C (86F) ambients, and the case copes well with the fans on medium or high (they have a three speed switch, which is why they are called tri-cool).

Also, all the smaller images have larger versions on the 3rd and 4th pages if my gallery, if you need them.

Edit: I should note, that without the bottom fan, my PSU got so hot (~60C+) that it was raising the temps of my video card noticeably, even through the divider. With the fan, it's barely luke warm running LinX and FurMark at the same time.

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I tend to disagree...
My HDD is 25c at 20-21C ambient.



The PSU would be inside the fan if I had one in there.

The Case is pure love except for this pull setup.
They should really had made it push the air to the HDD as push is so much better.

Thanks for the REP though dear anon.
Hope you like this case.
As said this only is happening if you have these monster PSU's.