Introduction

Antec has produced some very popular high end PC cases geared toward power users who like to keep things quiet, their P180 and P150 integrate a series of effective noise reducing features with success.

Of course not everybody is as “obsessed” with silence; many people can easily work/game/… with the noise of spinning fans and hard drives present. To accommodate high end but price conscious users Antec has engineered the Nine Hunderd (900) PC chassis.



From their site:



The Nine Hunderd series is Antec’s new Gamer orientated case, gamer in this case being: airflow and good looks. The 900 comes with 4 fans pre-installed, one of them a gigantic 200mm beast which is integrated in the top panel.



The front of the case is module based where you can swap position of 5.25” and 3.5” devices freely with the help of the included HDD drive bays and custom front plates.


Specifications




Goodies include: a manual, screw bag, custom 3.5" drive plate and a 3.5" to 5.25" HDD bay and a piece of rubber to be placed in the tray of the top panel.

The 900 series has plenty of space for a mid-tower case, although it does measure a bit higher than the other mid-sized cases I’ve seen from Antec; in the photo’s below you can see how the Nine Hunderd compares in size to a 2L Coke Bottle:



Let’s take a closer look on the next page ->

Cooling, lots of airflow

The Nine Hunderd case is all about airflow and Antec generously provides you with 3 TriCool 120mm fans, each has a separate fan speed selector (High/Medium/Low), the front 2 ones are equipped with Blue Leds. The eye catcher of the 900 is without a doubt the top panel fan which measures an impressive 200mm with huge fan blades and also a separate fan speed controller.

A steel grill with honeycomb design prevents objects from falling in, and at the same time keeps air flow obstruction to a minimum:



Similar honeycomb gratings can be found through the Nine Hunderd case design, the front panels covering the drive bays for instance:



The rear fan grill:



And the side panel fan grill:



The last grill expands quite a bit and takes up a large part of the side panel, the other area is filled with a plastic window which allows you to peak inside

Here come the fans

The side panels can easily be installed/removed thanks to the use of thumbscrews, once opened you can see a few things out of the ordinary:



Where you expect the power supply to be, the motherboard is situated, the PSU goes at the bottom, this design choice leaves the upper case area to be cooled by the large 200mm fan. There are two hard drive bays preinstalled, each is held in place by a set of… 8 thumbscrews, 4 at each side, it’s quite cumbersome to remove, but you won’t be swapping disks every day, right? Each bay can accommodate three hard drives, with one 120mm fan sitting in the front, they will be very well cooled.



One of the two drive bays comes with an additional 120mm fan holder at the back, so you can further increase hard drive and system cooling if desired. Hard drive installation takes some time, as you can see in the first two photo’s from left in the thumbnail row above, each disk needs to be secured by 4 screws, now this isn’t such a big deal if you have a screwdriver with a magnetic head, if you don’t have one, you are in for a time consuming experience of getting the screw to fit correctly into the hole before you can screw it in. Coming from countless easy to access or plug and play HDD installation methods, this was quite a drawback.

Ones the hard drives are in place it’s party time though; the case is roomy, comes with re-usable cable management tools and does not have sharp edges.

The CPU heatsink will be in a very well ventilated area:



While the lower case area will profit from your PSU’s outtake:



The PCI slots are covered by small metal plates, each one is held in place by a small screw, no tool-less features here. The plates have four rectangular holes to further improve airflow throughout the case.

Now let’s fill her up with some hot hardware ->

Installation

Antec was kind enough to send along one of their latest Power Supplies aimed at the power hungry, yet not going overboard yet, gamers, rated at 650W this TruePower Trio! packs quite a punch.



The included cables are long enough to reach the furthest locations in this mid-sized tower case; the connectors are plentiful and geared towards SATA / SLI users:



- 20+4 ATX connector
- 4-pin 12V connector
- 8-pin Xeon/EPS connector
- 2x 6-pin PCIe connectors
- 5x 4-pin power connectors
- 2x 4-pin floppy power connectors
- 4x SATA power connectors
- 2x 4-pin Fan (12v thermostatically only) connectors

I don’t have the proper gear the successfully test a 650W power supply, but do trust in testing metholodology of jonnyGURU’s review, the Trio is build by Seasonic, its fan doesn’t become audible until you pass over 500W load, and it stays relatively silent until you hit the max; load of 650W.

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© jonnyGURU



Check out his full review here.

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Installation – AMD System

After placing the additional stand offs on the motherboard tray the system is ready for completion, the motherboard can be screwed in tight quickly, the lack of a removable motherboard tray doesn’t really bother too much as there is plenty of maneuvering space inside the case. I decided to remove the additional plastic 120mm fan holder which normally clicks onto one of the two hard drive bays:



Initially the VGA card was installed in the upper PCI slot, which made the two DVI connectors use the upper most PCI slot:



Antec discovered a compatibility problem in this case, back at the end of October they send out this note to those people with early product samples:



The Nine Hunderd cases you find on stores shelves today are revised versions, and you won’t have the issue I ran into:



With the VGA card in the 2nd high speed PCIe slot of the Asus the connectors worked as designed. Cable management can be challenging depending on where the additional motherboard power connectors need to go, since the PSU is at the bottom and most of these connections are to be made at the top of the motherboard you’ll have cables running everywhere. Thanks to the cable binders at the right side of the motherboard most cables can be kept out of the airflow path.



The 5.25” drives are screwed to the chassis, and don’t obstruct the installation of the motherboard, the case is deep enough to accommodate larger optical drives.



If you have more than six hard drives you can use the extra 3.5”>5.25” bay, installation is straight forward, which is expected for such a simple device



Installation – Intel System

While testing the case with AMD system did help to evaluate the easiness of installation/removable, the thermal capabilities of the 900 could not be fully exploited with a lowly clocked Opteron CPU and rather cool running 7900GT video card.

With help of few friends and selling of some Christmas present I was able to build a Core 2 based system powered by nVIDIA’s latest GPU, the 8800 GTX. This video card is a monster compared to previous generation cards, and it can be a challenge to fit inside your case.



The Nine Hunderd Case doesn’t pass the test with flying colors, but it comes close, you don’t need a dremel to make it fit. That additional plastic 120mm fan for one of the drive bays needs to go, this makes it possible to fit the Geforce 8800 GTX, you will loose a HDD spot in the drive bay though:



With the hardware inside it’s time to power on ->

Case upright

The 900 lacks a power-on led, but makes up for it by the two 120 Blue LED fans, there is a HDD activity led though, and power/reset button at the top of the case:



Hooking up the front panel connectors (Firewire/Sound/USB) is made quite easy as they are pretty much plug and play with your motherboard’s manual nearby. With the case in upright position you can place the rubber mat in the tray:



During the day the Nine Hunderd’s LEDs fan don’t quite stand out, only when looking from the front you’ll notice them:



Once darkness arrives this case provides quite a light show:



The effect is less stellar looking at the case from the side, I wonder why they didn’t include a rear LED fan too?

Update 6/1/2007: I received word from Antec that they are now shipping in the Nine Hundred case with a rear LED fan too!



Stress testing next ->

Stress Test AMD System

AMD Test Setup
CPU	Opteron 144 @ 2.25Ghz
Cooling	Scythe Mine @ 100%
Mainboard	Asus A8N SLI Premium
Memory	2 * 512Mb PC3200 OCZ
Other	Club3D 7900 GT with Zalman VF900 Antec TruePower Trio! 650W Maxtor 200GB SATA HDD

The room temperature was ~20°C, the noise level was recorded at 50cm from the front of the case. The fans were set to High, Medium and Low speed, temperatures were recorded of CPU, VGA, Mobo chipset and Hard Drive. These were the results:



The impact on the CPU, Motherboard and Hard Drive is minimal when reducing the fan speed, the noise level drops drastically though, at High speed the case is definitely loud and quite noticeable from far away. At medium speed it’s more bearable, but the still not quite relaxing. At low fan speed the noise level is a mere ~3dBA over ambient and while it’s not dead silent, it will be quiet system for most of us.

The VGA sees the largest temperature increase, which is also related to the VF900CU fan speed, so overall with this AMD system the low fan speed is sufficient to keep all components very cool.

Let’s throw out the 7900GT and install the Geforce 8800 GTX, power consumption jumped up from ~180W to ~230W at full load, can the Nine Hunderd handle the extra heat; to help it out I tested with an additional 120mm ~1200rpm fan (Papst) in the side panel:



The noise level with/without the side panel remains the same as the ~1200rpm fan is drowned out by the much louder front fans. Impact on performance is less than stellar, with 1°C drop on CPU and Motherboard. Going for silent the system remains quite cool, the Geforce 8800 GTX stock cooling is remarkably quiet even at full load; I couldn’t hear a difference with the Zalman VF900Cu @ 5v! Temperature wise the CPU, Mobo and VGA temperature a rise ~3°C, not bad at all.

I see no reason to recommend the medium/high fan setting, as the extra noise doesn’t deliver a large enough performance increase.

Stress Test Intel System

Intel Test Setup
CPU	Intel Core 2 E6400 @ 2.8Ghz (from CSMSA
Cooling	Coolermaster Hyper TX
Mainboard	Intel 975X Bad Axe (Modded by Piotke)
Memory	2 * 1Gb PC6400 OCZ
Other	XFX Geforce 8800 GTX Antec TruePower Trio! 650W Western Digital 74Gb Raptor SATA HDD Maxtor 200GB SATA HDD

The E6400 was running at 2.8Ghz without a vcore increase, plug and play, nowhere near the limits of this CPU. The CPU temperature was obtained using this nifty Core Temp utility, the motherboard temperature in the chart below is actually the read-out from a sensor which sits between the DDR2 slots.



This system proved hotter, the Geforce 8800 GTX with the fans at high is running 5°C hotter compared to the AMD system, at low case fan speed the difference is ~4°C.

In the end though the low fan speed setting proves sufficient enough to keep everything cool, the DDR2 ram area sees the largest benefit from the high fan speed, all other components only drop 2-3°C, not quite worth that extra noise.

Let’s wrap things up ->

Conclusive thoughts

After spending more than a month with the Antec Nine Hundred series, installing different systems inside and working with it day by day, it’s clear this case is not as bad as some other reviews might want you to believe. While the case is not perfect, its drawbacks are minor, hard drive installation is time consuming, but you don’t remove hard drive every day. If you want to fit a larger VGA card, you might loose one hard drive spot, not too bad deal, seeing as you got room for 7 hard drives in this mid tower case.

If you shop around a bit this case is already available for prices below $100 which makes it quite a deal. The Nine Hundred lacks tool-less features to reduce cost, but compensates with ample amount of space for an air cooled PC system and comes with no less than high quality 4 case fans preinstalled. The case fans at low fan speed provide an excellent balance between performance and noise and will keep the newest system components running cool.



Its steel construction makes it less then ideal for LAN parties as the empty case already weighs in over 14kg, and without carrying handles it’s not a case you should plan to move around a lot. Once it is installed though it will blend in perfectly, unless you don’t like cool blue LED fans. There are no dust filters to be found on the in-take fans, if you plan to install the case near a dusty area you might want to look into making a few of your own.

At the end of the day you have to ask yourself the question what you want for your PC case, the Nine Hundred offers excellent cooling, enough working space, good expandability and an attractive price for the features offered. Whether it’s the ideal case for you depends on your needs.

I hope this review was useful for our readers; I like to thank Antec for being patient while I was building my Core 2 / 8800 GTX system so I could properly stress test their latest gamer’s case.