Antec Nineteen Hundred Review

[section_title title=Conclusion]

Conclusion

With the Nineteen Hundred being the latest flagship chassis to come out of the Antec skunk works I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that it has been highly anticipated. I know when I first saw images I imagined it being a total beast for water cooling being able to accommodate at least 2x 360mm radiators. So lets see what my opinions on this behemoth were are how well it sized up to the competition in reality.

From the outset I am going to say this is not going to be a positive review. Whilst there are positives, it is mainly bad. This really was a let down from Antec. After getting the P100 and ISK600 for review, I was really starting to look forward to this case. However, one day myself and Gavin were talking about water cooling set ups, then the penny dropped with an alarming clang. For a case this large, the water cooling capability is dire. 2x 240mm radiator support as a minimum, in a case this big and expensive seem extremely short sighted. The minimum that this chassis should have been aiming for is 2x 360mm radiator support and to be brutally honest, if the whole layout was redesigned, then a 480mm radiator in the front would have been perfect. I cannot understand why Antec have also decided to put the bottom section on this chassis as it appears to have been a quick afterthought by the way that it is just riveted on. Whilst there is a 120mm installed in this section of the chassis, there is no where for the air to circulate and escape. The panels for this section are woefully designed as every time I even knocked the chassis they would open with a bang on the floor.

The fan controller in the top of the case is a poor design. Looking at other chassis on the market, my old Corsair 650D comes to mind, you would expect a fan controller to be in an easy to access area, such as the front of the chassis, and to have all the necessary power and fan input on the back of the motherboard tray for easy cable management. However, the placement of this fan controller meant that I had to have a train of molex extenders going all the way up to the top of the chassis. Seeing as Antec do not include a Molex extension, it is yet more money an end user will need to pay out to use this feature. Talking about extensions. If you want to be able to power the 24pin and 8pin on the motherboard, you will need extensions for those, and probably for the graphics card power if you are going to use the lower power supply mount. Is this an expense you really need from a £200 chassis? No.

Whilst it is possible to put a water cooling loop into this chassis with the 240mm roof mount, a case of this size is really demanding more. If you wanted to modify the chassis, it is possible, but you will need to get busy with the dremel. You would need to drill out the rivets for the hard drive cage as well as the optical drive bays. This would open the front of the chassis up for the radiator. You could then fit a 360mm radiator in the front of the chassis and still have the hard drive racks in the bottom of the chassis for storage. I would then cut all the material out the front and bolt a 360mm steel fan grill to the chassis to give it some rigidity back. I would do the same in the roof as well. This is the way I would go about getting a good water cooling loop in this chassis. Again, should you be doing this much work on a £200 chassis? No.

Now for a few of the good things about the chassis, the aesthetics are simple and with the red and green accents should allow them to fit in with a lot of colour themes from different motherboard vendors. The construction of the chassis is relatively strong, but the exterior plastic panels could have been finished a little better as they do feel a little cheap to the touch. Maybe a brushed aluminium finish all over would have worked better. The performance of the chassis was good with it being in the upper end of our graphs. However, this came at the expense of noise. I will not that these tests were run with the fans set to high on their individual fan controllers, but even on low, the difference wasn’t great.

I really do believe that Antec have missed a big chance with the Nineteen Hundred. Many of us were looking forward to a big case full of features able to hold big water cooling set ups and live up to its name as the ultimate machine. Instead I have been left feeling like this case really was not thought about and rushed together.

I would like to thank Antec for the sample and look forward to seeing more from them in the future.

The Antec Nineteen Hundred, along with more products from Antec are available to purchase from Overclockers.co.uk