Antec Skeleton

Skeletons in the Closet?

The clearance problems caused by the Antec Skelton’s plastic frame don’t stop at after market heatsinks though – uncommonly tall graphics card like the Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra won’t fit either and cards with vertical power connectors like all of Nvidia’s GTX 200 range will need flexible six and eight pin PCI-E power connectors to squeeze under the frame. This only adds to our frustration here, especially as this flaw goes a long way to eliminating a pretty big portion of the enthusiast market.

Despite the serious clearance flaws though, we’ve not yet looked at the Skeleton’s centre piece – its headline feature – the huge 250mm “Big Boy” cooling fan mounted in the centre of the frame above the motherboard tray blowing cool air directly down onto the core components below.

This huge clear bladed fan is fitted with three speed settings (controlled by a top mounted switch) and with a whole host of coloured LEDs allowing for up to sixteen different colours. Sixteen! We haven’t seen this many colours on a piece of hardware since Tim dropped Skittles on his keyboard, and the transition between them is delightful to watch – the smooth shift between lighting colour really is mesmerising to behold.

The fan colour is controlled by a simple button next to the fan speed control, allowing you to cycle through the different colours, or to just switch the lighting off altogether. Sadly though, this is reset every time you restart the PC with the fan reverting to the default setting of slowly cycling through its varied colour palette.


While we love the funky fan, the sacrifices to include it we’re not so enamoured with, especially the fact that the fan’s mount on the back side of the case is the main culprit for the incompatibility with almost all our favoured CPU heatsinks and a significant slice of the graphics card market. While we’re sure the huge fan will improve GPU operating temperatures, we’re unsure if the sacrifice of a decent aftermarket heatsink for a stock model will be made up by the ventilation from the 250mm “Big Boy.”

As well as the enormous fan the plastic frame also houses the Antec Skeleton’s front panel, which is decently kitted out with two USB 2.0 ports, a Firewire 400 port, microphone and headphone sockets with support for both AC97 and HD audio and even an eSATA connection, as well as very satisfying power and reset buttons.

Sadly, there’s another problem here though, as the front panel cables are not long enough to allow the hardware tray to slide out fully with them connected, making for a very frustrating process of plugging and unplugging them whenever you want to tinker, less you bend the motherboard header pins by accident.


At the rear of the frame there’s also an easily removable add on card bracket to secure your graphics and other PCI/PCI-E cards into – a very useful inclusion, especially as wobbling unsecured GFX cards are always a concern for us on our own test benches. And speaking of test benches, let’s see how the Skeleton performs under pressure when we turn up the heat with high CPU and GPU load testing.