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The front intake spaces are equipped with washable filters and can draw air from both sides of the case. There is a vent on both sides at the front. The grates are very generous for airflow and won't cause much in the way of restricting airflow or causing excessive noise. Even with all these fans installed and running on high the noise level is very acceptable. If I turn the TriCool fans to low or medium it gets even better as far as noise is concerned. This is a very quietly designed case.
The power supply placement at the bottom of the case takes some getting use to. Wire routing is generally very easy but it did require a bit of planning. The sliding panel between the lower and upper chambers is nice as it isolates the heat. Some power supplies may be a tight fit as was my OCZ PowerStream. Also some power supplies and motherboard layouts may be troublesome. If your PSU doesn't have very long wires it could be a problem. Some of my wires were just barely long enough. I have seen complaints like these on various forum boards with particular mention of the new modular types of PSU's. Another problem I had was that my video card (PNY 6800 Ultra) has two Molex connectors on the end of it. They were a very tight fit as the hard drive cage and hard drives are right up against the plugs. But it does work. I still have some wire management to take care of but overall installing the system was pretty straight forward.
Here's a picture of the finished product.
System specs:
Motherboard: MSI K8N Neo 2 Platinum
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Dual-Core
Memory: Crucial Ballistix PC4000 2x1024 Mb
Video Card: PNY GeForce 6800 Ultra
PSU: OCZ PowerStream 520 watt
Optical: LiteOn DVD/RW
Storage: 4x200 Gb Maxtor DiamondMax and 2x300 Gb Maxtor MaxLine
Here you can see where the PSU would have a problem with the fan placement in the bottom. The fan was meant to be mounted on the left side of the center support. With a standard sized PSU this may not be a problem but I require lots of power for my system. Better to have too much than not enough I always say.
Overall I like this case. Antec has always built good looking functional cases in my opinion. It has a few flaws for my particular uses but then most people probably won't try to cram as much hardware in the case as I do. The fit overall is quite good and tight, with the exception of the door. My case has a very slight bow in the door which doesn't allow it to close tightly. Other than that everything else is very nice. The side panels actually fit so well that they're a bit hard to close. For a mid tower case it also cools very well. Even at full load my CPU temperature has never gone over 52° Celsius. The design with the two separate zones for hardware adds to the cooling potential if less hardware was installed. It is designed with good airflow in mind and built in filters just adds to the functionality without user modifiction. I would recommend this case to anyone looking for a well built mid tower.
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