Antec P180 Owners Thread

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Current thoughts on the case.

  • The top fan has developed a bit of a buzz, this is cause by a loose sticker!
  • I've taped up all the rear mesh holes to improve airflow in the case
  • Why does the top fan have a different mounting to the rear one? Strange
  • Wonder why Antec didn't fit rubber grommets to the supplied fans
  • Rubber feet are a nice touch :)
 
pflynn said:
Good photo's. You needed a flash on the internal one as you have camera shake on it due to low light.

Was it easy to install everything?

Is that a 3.5" Hard Disk in the lower bit near the PSU?
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Was fairly straightforward to install everything, takes a bit longer than a standard layout due to the different psu position. I had a little job getting my Audigy back in as it snags the ATX power cable.

It is indeed a HDD in the lower bay, a maxtor 160GB SATA drive. Having SATA makes the world of difference for routing the cable :)
 
What are the drive mountings like for the Hard Disk. I understand it comes with gel mounts for the screws. Any noise/vibration?
 
The bottom bay has four spaces for HDDs. They all have gel mounts for each.

There is also space for another set of 3 HDDs above this cage, but this just gets in the way of the air intake.

The mounts really are excellent, makes my drive really quiet :)
 
Question on the p180, which bits of it are plastic and which bits are metal, i need to knwo this for a mod im thinking of thanks.

Sorry to add questions to an owners thread.
 
I put my system together last tuesday and finished off things at the weekend. As everyone else has suggested it pays to take your time and think about what goes where. It took me about an hour to sort out which slot to put my Sound Blaster in so that the USB headers could be routed neatly ! Having the Hyper PSU also means working out which cable is the best lenght !





I've only got one HDD in the lower bay so have removed the lower fan and placed it in the fan slot in the upper bay. This allowed me to run the power cable through the hole normally taken up by the lower fan.



I've also run my FDD cable down through the PSU cable hole and back up through the "SATA/HDD drive cable hole/gap"

 
As I mentioned in an earlier post the hyper PSU cable wont quite fit on mobo's that have the connector on the "top left" side. I got an extension and managed to route it under my 6800 :) The 4 pin mobo cable again has an extension and runs over the rear 120mm fan.



I played around with fans on my Passive 6800 and found that a Zalman fan bracket works well when fixed to the mounting screws for the vga duct.



The last bit of tweeking at the weekend was routing all the fan cables so they dont get in the way. The two 120 mm exhaust fans have their cables routed under the mobo and into the back of the DVD writer (a good reason for putting it at the top). The intake fan sneaks down to the rear of the HDD - where I deliberatly did not use the SATA power connector but a normal molex.

All in all it's a great case though my temps are'nt that much lower than with the old Global Win case I replaced. That said it is much quieter for the same temps. I have a feeling that my old KV7 mobo is simply a warm one whatever I do with it. I think I'll play some more with fan configurations to see if I can improve things futher. I think this is the key to this case. You need to spend time getting it right....
 
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Not sure. I dont need to with this mobo (20 pin). Did'nt have any choice when I was running with the PSU that came with my Global Win case from ocuk 5 years ago....
 
pflynn said:
I'm pretty much set on getting the P180. Probably place the order this week or early next week.

Although I will eventually get an Athlon64 939 motherboard, I noticed a few worrying comments on this thread about power cables (20-pin) etc not reaching the sockets. My current motherboard is an Asus A7N8X-Deluxe Rev 2 with a standard Athlon XP.

I've got a Tagan TG480-U01 480W ATX2.0 SLi Compliant Silent PSU (CA-000-TG) PSU. The cables seem pretty long - but I understand I may have problems with the P180. Is that true?

If it isn't a problem, then I'll go ahead and order one - and post pics of it once done.
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i gave the internal measurements of the case on page 3 i think check them and check you cable length and you should be able to work out how well your cables will reach
 
Moved my 2 HDD's (200GB WD SATA and 36GB Raptor) to the lower cage this morning.

Temps have risen though - running defrag the WD SATA drive went up to 47c (speedfan reading) :(

Will have to move them back to the middle bay, where temps were running lower - cables are a bit more messy in the middle, though.
 
I've got my HD's in the middle cage, agreed about the cabling when in there.

How are you checking your HD temps? And whats a good or bad temp for them? (I've never checked the temps on my HD's before!)
 
One other thing to add, with the 2 120mm fans my room heats up pretty damn quick!

Never noticed the hot air coming out of my chieftec dragon, it probably absorbed a lot of the heat!
 
How are you checking your HD temps? And whats a good or bad temp for them? (I've never checked the temps on my HD's before!)
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Use a piece of software called "Speedfan" (google for it) - monitors Drive Temps for those drives which are SMART enabled (which is the majority).
 
These cases look excellent. Very interested in buying one, this thread is entirely to blame for that....

Does anyone know if they're ever coming out in black? I read somewhere (spcr i think) that they are planning a black model but it was limited edition or something. Anyone know any more about this?
 
W00dy said:
Use a piece of software called "Speedfan" (google for it) - monitors Drive Temps for those drives which are SMART enabled (which is the majority).
Click to expand...

Thats speedfan is a good product. Just tried it on my work PC and it's worked a treat.

The black SPCR was a limited edition. I think they are only going to be in this white colour - although I can't see how hard it would be to spray paint the case. As long as there was a base coat/metallic paint/lacquer it should paint up nice - although I'm not going to try when I get mine!! ;)

On a design note - why was the power/reset buttons put under the panel? It seems a pain to have to open the front to switch your PC on/off when most other cases have those exposed so you don't need to .
 
Everest will also read your HDD temps as well as other system temps. I think my Maxtor was about 32 or 33 last night, can't really remember.

The black version is fairly limited. You can only get it from a one shop in Canada and one shop in USA. Don't think we'll see it over here, which is a shame.

Will agree about the power and reset buttons, but if it has a lock, it kind of defeats the purpose of the buttons being behind the panel. But who really uses the lock? I could see it being useful at a lan or something though.
 
pflynn said:
On a design note - why was the power/reset buttons put under the panel? It seems a pain to have to open the front to switch your PC on/off when most other cases have those exposed so you don't need to .
Click to expand...


so you can lock the door and no one can go on your computer :)


a LAN it would be usefull
also maybe uni if you didnt want other people using it
 
dunny87 said:
so you can lock the door and no one can go on your computer :)


a LAN it would be usefull
also maybe uni if you didnt want other people using it
Click to expand...

The lock is very naff. You could probably break it open with a stiff pull, and without drawing much attention to yourself!
 
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