Antec P182 Mid-Tower Case - Articles / Reviews

Reviews: Cases

Antec P182 Mid-Tower Case

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Anthony Fiti
Kurtis
Antec
Jun. 27, 2007

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A Closer Look

The front panel I/O ports are comprised of a Firewire connection, two USB ports, and the headphone and microphone jacks. The connections are made to the motherboard, and the connections for the audio support both AC97 standards and HD Audio standards. The front panel door is double hinged, allowing you to open the door a full 270 degrees so it is right up against the side of the case.

Specific emphasis is made to keeping the case quiet. Like the P180 before it, two major tactics are used to accomplish this task. The first is the construction of the case - the sides of the case are made of a layer of plastic with aluminum on both sides. The other tactic is the use of vibration dampening strips of silicone as well as silicone grommets used in mounting hard drives.

The case comes with three 120mm fans - one on the back, one on the top, and one in the bottom between the power supply and the lower hard drive bay. All three fans are speed controllable (high, medium and low) and plug in via the standard molex 4-pin connector. However, one thing I noticed with the bottom fan is that wires from my power supply and the hard drives in the lower bay would block the spinning fan. The fan should come with shrouds for either side to make sure wires don't get caught in the fan blades. (Ed: I'd recommend just removing that fan completely to make cable management easier.)

There is plenty of room for cable management behind the motherboard; you can route the cables from the power supply behind the motherboard tray to various points around the motherboard, or route the cables around the fan to the lower hard drive enclosure. I found that some of my cables from my power supply were too short to be routed behind the motherboard tray so they had to be routed traditionally.

There are two washable fan filters in the front of the case in front of the two hard drive cages. You access the filters from the front of the case, which is nice because you don't have to open the case and remove it to get to the filters.

The upper hard drive cage can accommodate two drives and the lower cage can accommodate four. The upper cage uses trays to load the hard drive into the cage, and there is adequate space between drives for air to circulate and keep the drive cooler. Likewise, the lower cage also provided for space between the four drives, however the drives weren't loaded into trays. Rather, you screw them into the cage with silicone grommets between the cage and the drive.

Installing an optical drive was easy, simply attaching the drive rails, along with removing the plastic cover for the slot, and then rotating the metal cover back and forth until it came off.

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Page 3 of 6

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Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: First Looks
Page 3: A Closer Look
Page 4: Installation
Page 5: Quality Check
Page 6: Conclusion

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