Antec One Review

Antec One Review - Interior

Thumbscrews make getting inside the case painless. Once inside, the absolutely massive back plate cut-out exposes almost a third of the motherboard to the rear of the case. You should have no trouble fitting a back-plate secured CPU cooler without having to remove the motherboard, although keep in mind there’s only 155mm of clearance with the side panel fitted, so super-sized coolers will struggle.

As the back-plate hole reaches right up to the roof of the case, there’s no separate cut-out for the 8-pin ATX cable. We had to fit the PSU, run the cable through the gap and then fit the motherboard on top, which isn’t particularly elegant, but with a bit of fiddling you can still keep the number of visible cables to a minimum. While there doesn't appear to be much room behind the motherboard tray, the shaped side panels allow plenty of room to hide cables out of sight.


We would have liked to have seen rubber grommets covering up the pre-cut cable management holes though; the steel has been rolled so your wires aren’t in any danger of getting snagged, but it would help reduce the number of cables on show – especially as the entire case interior is painted black.

The 3.5in drive cage has been rotated 90 degrees, so you’ll need to remove the right side panel to install hard disks or SSDs. There are mounting holes for a 2.5in SSD in the bottom of the case, plus another above the 3.5in drive bays, but if you want to add any more you’ll need to use a 3.5in caddy – Antec only includes drive rails for 3.5in disks. The 5.25in drive bays all use tool-free mounting mechanisms too, so you won’t have to break out the screwdriver to install an optical drive.


Antec hasn’t fitted a 120mm intake fan, although there is a mount for one if you want to push extra air towards your hard disks or a graphics card. Another 120mm fan mount in the floor of the case is a welcome inclusion, especially as it can accommodate a larger 140mm fan, but you’ll only be able to use one if your PSU is a standard size. Larger length power supplies will obscure the mounting points, leaving you with just the front intake and side panel fan mounts to fix additional cooling. This is still plenty of potential from a budget case though.


One slight omission however is the loss of variable speed fans. The original Antec One Hundred offered a simple switch to alter the fans from high or low speed, but the One's pair of 120mm exhaust fans connect via 3-pin fan cables and offer no such speed-adjustment.