Introduction

We continue our search for the best cases out there and take a closer look at one of Antec's latest high end enclosures. Antec has been improving their case design, layout and functionality to cater to the increasingly critical demands of the hardware enthusiast.

Before we can start with the P182 review we must mention its predecessor, which we didn't get a chance to look at in the past, but its history is vital to understanding the existence of the P182. The Performance One P180 case was introduced Q2 of 2005, it was the result of a collaborative effort between Antec and SilentPCReview's owner Mike Chin. The P180 was designed to address two goals. Silent and Effective Cooling. They accomplished this by building separate chambers for better thermal management with less airflow. The PSU and HDD area were separated from the mainboard section. The airflow path was designed to work from front to back, using strategically placed 120mm fans. The panels of the case are hybrid, part plastic part metal to help dampening. Inside decoupling ideas for HDD are implemented to minimize vibration transfer. The front bezel design must leave enough transparency for air to enter the case unrestricted, yet block direct escape paths for noise.

The resulting enclosure christened P180, came very close to reaching both noise blocking and excellent cooling goals successfully, but as Mike Chin aptly stated: "there is no single perfect case". The P180 was an impressive product which was accepted by many as a first choice for building a quiet computer with high end components inside.

Today we have the successor in for review, first introduced at Cebit earlier this year; the Performance One P182 is a tweaked P180 enclosure, addressing the concerns and remarks made by end users.

The Box and What's Inside

The while Antec lists the P182 as a mid-size tower case, it lingers closer to a maxi tower; it comes in a large cardboard box with enough padding to remove risk of damage during transport.



It will take a sharp eye to spot the very small front cover damage, at the bottom a small piece of plastic cover snapped of during transport, the small bar is easy to super glue back into place without problem.



Don't let the manual fool you, the case is the P182, you get drive rails for CDROM and Floppy, as well as cable binders, fan mounting clips (more on that later) and a cool top spoiler to be placed… you guessed it, at the top of the case.

Specifications

The P182 is a tweaked P180, official specifications don't change much:



Size, weight, drive bays all remain unchanged, the cooling configuration does alter a bit, no more VGA cooling duct, all fans are TriCool 3-speed; and optional front and middle of case (height of VGA card) mounting position for 120mm fan.

Let's take a look at the outside to see if we can spot differences, and point out the good and bad ->

Size Comparison

The Antec P182B is not a small case, compared to our 2L coke bottle it stands tall:

Antec P182B


We’ll compare the P182B with these cases:

NZXT Adamas

Antec Nine Hunderd Gaming Case

Casetek V.Orpheus

Coolermaster CM Stacker 830 Evolution

Silverstone TJ09

From the front:



The P182B is amongst the highest, the CM 830 Evo is noticeably wider; let’s look at the side:



Less deep than either Silverstone/Coolermaster case, but more roomy then the Antec Nine Hunderd.


Outside

The side panels are wrapped in plastic to prevent scratches and damage during transport:



Once removed the shiny black-grayish surface stands out:



The front door is less thick than the side panel, but also features the same double structure with plastic inside, and metal insert:



The rear reveals PSU placement, 2 water tube openings, large 120mm honey grate for the exhaust fan . Thumb screws on the left panel, normal screws on the right.

Outside, side, underside , offside !

A profile shot of the P182B reveals the exhaust top fan spoiler, as well as the near perfect paint/color finish:



The top fan spoiler is optional, and can be removed:



If we flip the case on its side you can see the 4 soft rubber feet which help prevent vibration being transferred to the surface below;



A closer look at the side panel reveals it multi part structure, the main body is made from hard plastic, with colored insert at the outside and light grey metal at the inside to help the side panel sturdiness as well as block sound from escaping the case.



The front door is similar to the side panels, only lacks the light grey metal insert at the inside:



The door stays closed by use of 2 magnets, and is easy to open; it swivels on three hinges which allow the front door to completely flip outwards like this:



In the photo above you can see the ventilation grills at the each side of the front panel, where cool air is sucked in when the door is closed.

Inside & Cooling

The inside of the P182B is where it is at, you can see how the different compartments separate the motherboard area from the PSU and hard drive section.



Cooling wise the Antec P182B comes equipped with three 120mm TriCool fans, one at the top, one at the back, and one in front of the PSU.

The fan speed of the PSU can be set to High/Medium/Low by use of the known tri-selector cable coming from this fan. The top and rear fans however get a special treatment this time around. Their fan speed can be set at the back of the case, High/Medium/Low.



The default configuration recommended by Antec is to set these two at “Low” and the bottom one at Medium, this gives a good balance between cooling and noise.

For those seeking more cooling power you can attach and additional 120mm fan at the rear of the top hard drive cage as well as right before it:



In the photo above we used a Noctua 800rpm model for demo, the use of this fan does render the bay practically useless for hard drives.

Let’s get some hardware installed ->

Installation

Antec gave the P182B quite a bit of tool less features, but the motherboard tray is not one of them, it’s not removable and sits fixed inside in the case. On the upside you can easily remove the hard drive bays, which gives you more room to work with when installing your motherboard.

A turn of a thumbscrew is all it takes to remove these two drive bays:



The top HDD bay has a small compartment that can be used for storing small screws, nifty!



Both bays have white rubber anti-vibration rings, these are mounted on the removable racks on the top bay:



The bottom bay features no removable racks but can hold more drives too (2 vs 4).



Optical drives use plug and play drive rails and sit sturdy inside the case:



The Antec P182B offers plenty of good features to make installation easier; but so far none really stand out from crowd, until you see this photo:



That’s nothing special one might say, it’s the same as the P180, right? Not quite, Antec moved the motherboard panel slightly inwards, creating room for cables to hide behind the panel, thus helping reduce cable clutter. A very useful feature which I hope they continue to include in future cases.

They have also increased the size of the passage between the upper and lower part of the case, so you can push more cables through, a plastic cover can be slid back/forwards to minimize the gap:



The power supply is installed inside its own rubber strip surrounded cage at the bottom of the case



But here I did encounter some issues worth mentioning, if you a longer power supply unit, the cables coming out of the PSU will interfere with the 120mm fan installed there. In our case, the Antec TruePower Trio was small enough to not let this happen.



Things aren’t much better on the other side of the fan, where the SATA cables come uncomfortably close to the fan too.



The solution of course is to completely remove the bottom 120mm fan, we’ll see in our performance tests if that has a measurable impact.

While fitting the large NVIDIA 8800GTX card we almost ran into problems, if we had been using the top hard drive bay, if we remove the racks, it fits with millimeters to spare:



Installation continues on the next page ->

Test Setup and Test Methodology

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

Room temperature was 20°C during testing, ambient noise clocked in at 37.8dBA. Noise measurements were taken at 50cm from the front of the case.

Realtime HDR and Orthos were used to stress the Dual Core system; Core 2 Temp was used to monitor Core temperature (duh) and Speedfan to check the temperature of HDD and Motherboard. Rivatuner’s temp monitor checked the G80 GPU at regular intervals. Maximum values were recorded.

The Intel Bax Axe motherboard features several thermal sensors, the “mobo” values are those recorded by the sensor which can be found between the DDR2 memory banks, marked A in the overview:

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The Antec P182B features excellent cable management features, let this photo speak for itself:




Only the 8-pin power cable for the motherboard had to pass from the front, which illustrates that your power supply needs lengthy cables in order to benefit from the Antec P182B cable hiding feature. The backside of the motherboard panel is less “nice” to look at, of course:



With 3 exhaust fans and no in-take the P182B relies on negative air pressure inside the case to draw in fresh air, which means: dust collector. In order to minimize the effect Antec installed two 120mm sized dust filters at the in-take points of the upper/lower part of the case. These can be very easily accessed from the front panel, and they hide behind these doors, which open with a small push at the right side.



They do their work admirably; 3 weeks of stress testing later the lower dust filter looked like this:



Both filters can be removed without the use of tools and are cleaned and installed again in less than a minute.

Onto the stress testing ->

Performance Tests

In the chart below we’ll use abbreviations to explain how the case fans configuration was; these setups were tested:

- R= Rear 120mm fan
- T = Top 120mm fan
- B = Bottom 120m fan
- F = Optional Front 120mm fan

Rear 120mm / Top 120mm @ Low and Bottom 120mm @ Medium. (Antec default configuration)

Rear 120mm / Top 120mm @ Low and Bottom 120mm @ Low. (Bottom fan needed for HDD cooling?)

Rear 120mm / Top 120mm @ Medium and Bottom 120mm @ Medium. (A good balance performance/noise?)

Rear 120mm / Top 120mm @ High and Bottom 120mm @ High. (Going all out, everything set to high speed.)

Rear 120mm / Top 120mm @ Low and Bottom 120mm @ Low + Front optional 800rpm fan installed.

To get more air to the VGA card we installed a Noctua 800rpm fan, it won’t add noise to the case, but will force air to the VGA card area; for the fan to fit we had to remove the top HDD bay, and snap the 120mm fan inside the provided bracket:



We compare the results with the best performance/noise results obtained with the other cases:



First things first: this case is silent! You have to set the fans to high speed to notice them, at medium speed they are but a whisper, at low settings they are less than 1 dBA over ambient… impressive result!

Performance wise the Antec P182B does ok in our books, CPU cooling at lower case fan speeds is less than what the competition (and their own Nine Hundred) offers, VGA cooling is excellent though, at high fan speed it’s the best on the block, at low fan speed it’s on par with the rest, adding a very silent fan in front drops VGA temps by ~2°C.

The bottom 120mm fan does serve a purpose for keeping the HDDs cool, between the low & high setting a ~5°C drop can be observed, but when the HDD is running at 32°C at low setting, there is nothing to worry about, and the fan can easily be removed to make way for better cable management.

Conclusive Thoughts

Antec set out to improve the Performance One P180 enclosure and they succeeded in their goal, the P182B is an improvement with better cable management capabilities and easier fan speed control at the back. Those into water cooling will appreciate the precut holes for tubes. Everything is not perfect though, improvements in the lower compartment of the case are necessary to allow larger power supplies and their cables to fit, without interfering airflow; the standard bottom 120mm fan is not really needed in our opinion.

The Performance One P182B lives up to its name, partly, noise wise it’s one of the quietest enclosures tested ever, but temperatures of the components were also a bit on the high side, you can’t have both ways it seems? (Very low temps + very low noise).

With an estimated retail price of ~$120 / ~€120, the Antec Performance One P182 offers a lot of value for your money, allowing high end hardware to remain cool and quiet inside, and it’s got sleek looks to boot!

The Antec P18x series truly offers a novel approach to PC cases and cooling, with working noise blocking/reducing features and wire management; we recommend it heartily to anyone seeking to build a silent high end system, but even a mid/lower end system should not shy away, taking into account its attractive price tag.

Antec Performance One P182
Recommended for



We thank Mafalda from Antec to allow us to test their product, until next time.