The Fate of Tyrlon and other Dubious Things

I just finished building a new computer for my younger brother and took a couple of pictures of the internals of the case after the machine was constructed.  The case in question is an Antec P182 and can be had from NewEgg.Com for around $150.

In this first picture you can see the upper chamber where the motherboard is at.  If you look closely in the upper right you can see the power cables coming from behind the motherboard through openings in the top.  This is a feature I really like about this case, instead of running power cables over top the motherboard, you run them out the side and up the back wall and then back through above the motherboard.  The only cables running over the motherboard are the SATA cables, the main motherboard power cable which comes up from the lower chamber and the front panel cables (front USB, Firewire and Audio ports). (click the picture to see the full-size image)

In the next picture, you can see the lower chamber of the case (to orient the picture in your mind rotate it to the left about 30 degrees). The power supply in this case is unusual in that it is installed in a cage in the lower chamber of the case.  This allows for better cooling of the power supply with the built in lower chamber fan.  Also, you can see the lower hard drive cage in the lower right of the picture.  This hard drive cage is cooled some by the lower chamber fan and also has rubber grommets to dampen vibration and drive noise!  You can see the holes between the lower and upper chamber where you can run power cables up and over to the hard drive cage and the main power cable up to the motherboard.  There are also two 120mm system fans at the top and rear of the case that are speed controllable from the back of the case.  You have three settings, low, medium, and high so that you can adjust for your noise / cooling level needed.  The lower chamber fan also has a speed control but it is not accessible without opening up the case so I set it at medium to provide a good amount of airflow through the lower chamber.  The power supply is also raised off the floor of the case to allow for the power supply’s own fan to get good airflow and cooling from underneath.

Overall, I really like the P182 case.  The exterior which I haven’t shown here is a color they call “gun-metal black” which is more like a dark grey.  The front panel is lockable and has two hard drive LEDs and a power LED light, as well as space for lots of 5.25″ drives and a second hard drive cage for 3.5″ drives mounted in the upper chamber.  My only complaint about the case is that the front panel piece (the part with the door and that surrounds the 5.25″ drives etc) is attached to the main case with plastic pieces that apparently are fairly easy for the shipping companies to break if they manhandle your case at all in shipment.  The plastic pieces were almost all broken so the front panel was falling off when I received the case.  Luckily, Antec has good warranty support so a quick call to them confirmed the issue and they are shipping out another front panel piece to my younger brother and he can then just slap it on to replace the front panel.

On the proverbial 1-10 scale, i’d rate this case an 8.5.  It would get a higher score but they need to re-visit the durability of the front panel piece and make the connections metal like the rest of the case is instead of using plastic.

Edit: I have since built another machine for my Dad using this case and lo and behold, Antec figured out if you rotate the shipping box such that the front panel faces up instead of being one of the load-bearing pieces stuck in the foam for shipping, it doesn’t cause nearly as many to break!  Basically they figured out how to ship it such that my dad’s case arrived in pristine condition, and when I shipped it to my dad from here I packed it the same way and it worked like a charm!

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