Antec Nine Hundred

Assembly

Having toured around the case, it was time to actually get a system set up. This isn't the largest case in the world, being mid-tower sized, so we weren't expecting great things in terms of usability. The case immediately cheesed us off by making us remove the off-side case panel just to pull out one of the drive cages to install a drive. In an age of toolless installation, brackets and simplicity, having to pull off both sides of the case just to install a hard drive was aggravating.

The drive cage pulls out of the front of the machine and then allows you to screw a drive directly into the cage. With the cage back in, there is sufficient, if not epic, room for the ATX motherboard.

So much for being the ultimate gamer's case: the GeForce 8800 GTX doesn't fit in with the standard fan bracket installed. We had to pull the drive cage back out, unclip the bracket and then slot it back in again (grazing our fingers on the eight thumbscrews required to perform this operation each time). As we looked to put the card in, we had to go and grab a screwdriver to attach it to the expansion mount - call us spoilt, but we haven't had to do that in any of the last cases we've looked at.

Getting the PSU in at the bottom caused no problems, and Antec provides two PSU external covers to allow you to mount it both ways up, depending on the orientation of the fans on the supply. We were easily able to stuff spare cables into the bottom drive cage.