Antec P190

We had no other problems with the installation of the system into the Antec P190 other than a heatsink, and little perks of the design and attention to detail – such as handles on the drive cages and spaces for cable routing – made the machine very ease to work with in this regard.

We spent some time fiddling around with the different fan speeds of the machine and found that there was some definitely noticeable noise with the fans set to high, but this lessened drastically if the speed was reduced. Makes sense.

On low speed the fans were barely a problem unless one was standing behind the case and the case was as appreciably quiet, though not as quiet as previous models. One thing we had to be wary of was stray cables getting caught in the fans and getting shredded. The cable ties are there people – use them!

All in all, the noise performance of the machine was very good when the fans were set to low, but even on medium the sound started to get a little too loud, but underneath a desk this would be less of an issue. On high speed, the case was practically a windtunnel and the noise would have been too much even had the case been under a desk.

Conclusions

Coming to a conclusion on the P190 is quite difficult in all honesty as it uses the same basic design as the P182 and the additional features like the side fan only offer extra concerns involving the heatsink. On the other hand, the machine handles well and looks gorgeous. It's clear to us that Antec is a company that spends time listening to customers and looking for ways to improve its cases.

There's no doubt that the P190 looks great and that it's fully feature loaded – with everything from a side fan to a torch – but its performance heat-wise is a bit of a worry. Could all those fans actually be interfering with each other? It's certainly possible, though a test with a different heatsink may yield better results.


Cost is also an obvious factor and with the Antec P190 costing around $355 in the US, or £230 in the UK it's also one of the most expensive cases we've had a look at in a long, long while. For this price we'd really expect something special though and, while the Antec P190 looks good on paper, it's let down by a number of the decisions that Antec made.

Those reasons mean that it falls just short of the standard set by the awesome P182. Unless you're made of money and can afford to buy this rig and experiment with different heatsinks for a bit then the P182 is a much safer choice for most users, though there's no doubt that the P190 will appeal to some thanks to the bragging rights it carries with it.

• Build Quality
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• 10/10

• Ease of Use
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

• Features
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• 9/10

• Performance
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

• Value
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• -
• 6/10

• Overall
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

What do these scores mean?