Antec P183 Case Review

Today we have the predecessor to the P180. What improvements have been made? Is it a better case?

Antec, Inc. is the global leader in high-performance computer components and accessories for the gaming, PC upgrade and Do-It-Yourself markets. Founded in 1986, Antec is recognized as a pioneer in the industry and has maintained its position as a worldwide market leader and international provider of quiet, efficient and innovative products. Antec has also achieved great success in the distribution channel, meeting the demands of quality-conscious system builders, VARs and integrators.

Antec’s offering of enclosures includes a wide range of cases, such as its advanced Performance One Series, economical New Solution Series and VERIS family of media components designed for the home theater PC market. Antec’s products also include front line power supplies, such as its premium Signature Series, powerful TruePower Quattro Series and EarthWatts, one of the most environmentally friendly power supplies available. PC gamers are an increasingly significant consumer of performance components, and many Antec products are designed for the gaming demographic, like the premier gamer enclosure: the Nine Hundred. Antec also offers a line of computer accessories comprising many original products, including its patented LED fans and notebook cooling solutions.

Antec is headquartered in Fremont, California, with additional offices in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, as well as in the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, China and Taiwan. The company’s products are sold in more than 40 countries throughout the world. Please visit www.antec.com for more information.

The Antec P180 has long been a favourite amongst system builders for its vast features and usability. But even though it was a case at the top of its league it still came with its faults. Antec have gone away, taken onboard feedback from customers/review sites and produced a new successor – The Antec P183. It’s nice to see that Antec have seen it important to address these issues, we will giving the P183 a thorough examination today and giving our verdict whether its a success or failure.

Specifications

Dual chamber design isolates heat and noise: the power supply resides in a separate chamber to isolate heat and reduce system noise
No power supply included
Power supply option: comes with a power supply mounting adapter to mount either a standard size power supply or Antec’s exclusive CP Series power supply
Innovative three-layer, sound-deadening side panels and front door (aluminium, plastic, aluminium) dampen noise and ensure Quiet Computing™
11 drive bays
– External 4 x 5.25″; 1 x 3.5″
– Internal 6 x 3.5″ for HDD
Cooling system:
– 1 rear (standard) 120mm x 25mm TriCool™ fan
– 1 top (standard) 120mm x 25mm TriCool™ fan
– 1 lower front chamber – 120mm fan (optional)
– 1 upper front chamber – 120mm fan (optional)
– 1 middle chamber – 120mm fan (optional)
Cable organizers behind motherboard tray minimize cable clutter
Front-mounted ports provide convenient connections:
– 2 x USB 2.0
– 1 x eSATA
– Audio In and Out (HDA and AC’97 compatible)
Double hinged door opens up to 270
7 expansion slots
0.8mm cold rolled steel chassis for durability
Motherboard: Mini-ITX, microATX and Standard ATX
Case dimensions:
– 20.25″ (H) x 8.1″ (W) x 19.9″ (D)
– 514 mm (H) x 205 mm (W) x 507 mm (D)

What’s new in the P183:

– Front door vents, as well as wider vents along the door frame, improve airflow into the chassis.
– Filters and filter doors are integrated as one unit. The doors themselves have been modified to provide greater airflow, resulting in cooler system temperatures.
– Drive bay covers are vented and include air filters to provide better airflow.
– Lower chamber fan is now located in front of the hard drive cage, allowing for installation of longer PSUs as well as easier cable routing between the lower HD cage and the power supply.

Exterior

The P183 comes dressed inside a pleasantly presented box, detailing all the relevant specifications with some cropped previews of the case itself. The box has a nice finish to it but unfortunately the box our sample was sent in was damaged during transit. So its looking like it needs a little bit of TLC.

Opening the box and removing polystyrene reveals the P183. When first removing the case from the box you will notice that the front and sides are protected with a sticky film to ensure that the panels remain untouched. Removing these layers expose the delicate gun-metal finish. The surface is very smooth, your fingers glide over the surface.

The front panel of the P183 offers typical functionality. We have USB, audio, and eSATA ports for quick and easy usability. Taking a closer look at the front panel we can see that it features a double hinged front door. The hinge allows the door to fully open (270 degrees) and has some adjustments made to improve airflow, there are larger openings to encourage intake air to circulate. The door is fairly solid and there are no issues at all with the design Antec have gone with. With the front door open, we can observe the drive bay, after a few moments it’s not long before you realise there have been some excellently implemented design ideas here. The materials used here are mesh and plastic. It looks good and on paper should offer some improved airflow. Each device installed to be accessed at the front of the case can be added easily by pushing in the two tabs either side and removing the cover. All that you have to do is apply the brackets to your DVD/Blueray/card reader and these drives just slide in and lock into place. (More on this in the installation section of the review).

The P183 boasts a redesigned 120mm exhaust outlet. Antec have pretty much integrated this cage directly into the top of the case rather than have it external as it was on the P180. The spoiler style design has gone and a much more practical design is now in place.

Around the rear side of the case there is little change from the P180, the only real difference from the typical conventional approach to cases is that the PSU is mounted at the bottom of the case inside its own chamber. We have the ability to host Antec’s very own CP series PSU in the P183 which are larger in size, and although this is a new standard its nice to see that this case has the option of being able to handle a CP PSU, adding some future-proof to the case. There are two outlets for the option of having a watercooling kit installed inside the P183. At the very top we have some quick access fan control for both the top 120mm fan and the rear exhaust 120mm, there are three speed options to choose from.

One of the things which stood out to me as one of the well thought out design concepts on the P183 is the plastic around the very edge of the side panels. As a system builder the side panels are going to be on and off quite frequently and the usual metallic doors can be chipped very easily in the corners, you need something more robust, Antec have come up with a great idea here. Applying thumbscrews doesn’t damage paintwork either. Brilliant if you’re clumsy like me!

Interior

From the outset the P183 on the inside looks very similar to the P180 and for the most part there haven’t been any major changes. The P183 follows on the brilliant workmanship previous Antec cases have given us. Casting our eyes inside the case we see that the dual chamber design is still there, the power supply is nicely isolated at the very bottom of the case and there is a small shutter that allows you to feed cables through but minimize the gap thus enhancing the effectiveness of the airflow in and around the case. Towards the front of the case inside this lower chamber is a cage that can host up to 4 hard disk drives.

Directly above this compartment is another cage that can host a further 2 hard disk drives. Again the concept behind mounting these cages is similar to the P180. To remove a cage – remove a thumbscrew and pull the ring towards you to extract the cage. Once the cage is out, depending on which cage you have removed requires a different approach to installing a drive. To mount a hard disk drive in the upper cage you must remove a tray from the cage and use the large headed screws to secure the drive onto the tray. Care much be taken not to tighten these screws too hard as this will hinder the anti-vibration concept. For this I have made sure not to tighten the screws. Soon as this is done slide the tray into the cage and place the cage back into the fitment, applying the thumbscrew and slotting the ring back in place.

As you can see so far, you are able to completely isolate certain devices and completely customise the inside to your requirements. If you install your hard disk drives in the bottom chamber this allows you to install a fan to the upper 3.5″ cage by placing the two clips provided which ultimately supplies some additional cooling for your GPU. One thing to note is that we only have 2 120mm fans inside the P183, but extra fans can be installed to the front side of the case quite easily.

In and around the P183 there are anti-vibration strips to reduce noise. The door panels in particular have been equipped with some extra padding to dull out noise.

Installation

When it came to installing all the components inside the Antec P183 the whole process was a comfortable task. I began by installing the PSU first so that I could plan where all the cabling would go before any of the devices sat in the case. This generally reduces struggling and allows you to organise cable management with plenty of space and time.

As mentioned previous, hard disk drives are mounted by removing the cage from the case and then removing a tray from the cage and screwing the hard disk to the tray. Care must be taken not to tighten the screws too hard as this can crush the silicone and reduce the effectiveness of the anti-vibration technique. One thing to note is that on the front edge of the cage is a small compartment to store anything you might want – for example grip ties.

5.25″ and 3.5” devices are very easy to install, attach the required bracket to either side of the device – in this case I installed a DVD/RW along with a USB Card Reader. Remove the cover on the drive bay and simply slide the device into the slot and it will then nicely clip in and secure itself.

After this I installed the motherboard, I had no problems at all. The only slight niggle that I had was the power/reset switch header sockets were very close to the shutter that separates the lower chamber from the top chamber. I had to make a slight adjustment to the shutter so that it didn’t interfere with this section on the motherboard. One thing that I did find in my favour was that the rear eSATA ports on my Asus P6T Deluxe are easily accessed when inside the P18. With previous cases I have found this panel difficult to access.

So, overall a comfortable install and because of the carefully designed gullies and holes, cables can be hidden very neatly. The Antec P183 allows you to brush up on your cable management and this can only contribute to better airflow, this is something we are going to consider in the next section as we analyse the cooling performance of the Antec P183.

Testing and Conclusion

The assumption as to whether a case performs well is down largely down to how easy it is to install components and the standard of the build quality. Whilst this does determine the performance of a case, we really need to know how good the airflow is inside the P183 under various fan speed operations, along with the loudness of the fans at each speed mode. To ascertain this, we will perform 2 short tests along with comparing the P183 against the Antec Twelve Hundred Gaming case.

Low fan speed – idle/load
High fan speed – idle/load

Idle temperatures are taken from the CPU after a cold boot – 15 minutes idling in Windows. Load temperatures are taken from the CPU after 45 minutes of OCCT CPU stress test.

Test Setup

Processor: Intel 920 i7 @ 3.8GHz
Motherboard: Asus P6T Deluxe X48
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-C12P
Graphics: XFX 7900GT 256MB PCI-e
Audio: Creative X-Fi XtremeMusic
Hard Disk: 1xSamsung Spinpoint 500GB SATAII 1xWD 160GB SATAII
PSU: Antec Signature Series 650W PSU

Results

Antec Twelve Hundred

Antec P183

It’s pleasing to see that from the above results the P183 isn’t all that far behind the Antec Twelve Hundred case which hosts 6 fans including the notorious Antec Big Boy fan. When you compare the P183 only has 2 case fans, it leaves us in no doubt that the chamber along with the shutter system definitely aids airflow. I’m almost certain that if we were to install additional fans to the P183 it would be on par with the Antec Twelve Hundred’s cooling ability.

Sound

Whilst we cannot fault the build quality and cooling solutions found on the P183, we should not miss out the audible factor. After all this is something that can be an issue for some people.

I found the P183 to be a very quiet case on low and medium settings. The sound proofing on the door panels really does help here and of course all devices are secured using anti-vibration padding so there is no movement at all. When we move the notches up to high though, things do get quite noisy and disruptive.

Conclusion

The Antec P183 is an impressive addition to the Performance One Series of cases. From start to finish I have been pleased with every aspect. The construction, aesthetics and performance are reflected well for the price tag.

Installation was made very easy by the neat features inside, and given the functionality of this case we can further improve the already brilliant airflow by installing additional fans without much bother at all.

One slight niggle, that I feel could be addressed is the absent instructions manual from the case. For some, the task of installing various devices might not be so apparent.

All in all, the P183 is a visually appealing case that features some great craftsmanship and noise reduction. Suitable for any enthusiast that wants looks, performance and functionality. I would gladly recommend this case.