Antec P182 Advanced Super Mid Tower ATX Case (Black)

List Price: $169.00 Discount Price: $140.95

Features:

• Attractive gun metal black finish
• Dual chambers structure: The power supply (not included) is located in the lower chamber to isolate heat from the system and lower system noise
• Special three-layer side panels and front door (aluminum, plastic, aluminum) dampen system generated noise, making this one of the quietest cases available
• 0.8mm cold rolled steel for durability used through the majority of the chassis, 1.0mm cold rolled steel around the 4x HDD area
• 11 Drive Bays:- External 4 x 5.25inches 1 x 3.5 inches - Internal 6 x 3.5 for HDD

Customer Reviews:

Superb Design [Posted on 2008-01-05]
I've built 7 systems from scratch, and updated about a dozen others, and this is absolutely the best-designed case I have ever experienced. I can only point out two VERY minor issues:

1. One of the three 120mm fans is designed to pull air through the bottom drive cage and push it to the power supply for exhaust. To accomplish this task, Antec mounted the fan on the back side of a center "bulkhead" between the drive cage and the power supply compartment. This setup is fine if you don't have an over-sized power supply. My SilverStone Strider ST60F, however, is 180mm deep, which left very little space for cables between it and the fan. Antec's design, however, allowed me to simply reverse the fan's orientation on its mounting bracket, then mount the bracket to the front side of the bulkhead.Just be aware that this mounting position will not allow you to install hard drives in the bottom cage (you still have two HDD bays in the upper cage). I can't take any stars away, because this configuration works just fine for my system.

2. Antec put so much thought into cable management that I'm surprised they overlooked the last remaining trouble spot - the bottom of the motherboard. This area needs to accommodate cables for front-panel audio, USB, Firewire, and power/reset/LED connections. Yet nobody has ever thought I would need more than a couple of millimeters between the bottom of the MB and the case. It IS possible (though difficult) to secure these cables to the MB tray so only the connectors come out underneath the bottom edge of the MB. The alternative is to just run the cables in front of the MB, but that sort of nullifies some of the engineering that went into this case. Again, no stars lost, because I've never seen any case that addresses this issue, and it probably won't even bother most system builders.

buen case pero un poco caro [Posted on 2008-01-24]
El producto llego muy bien protegido contra golpes y a tiempo me hubiera gustado que el regulador de velocidad para el ventilador de los discos duros estuviera en un lugar mas accesible como el de los otros dos ventiladores ya que para poder subirle y bajarle velocidad a este ventilador hay que abrir el case aun asi no me arrepiento y lo considero una buena inversion tiene buen espacio ya que en el futuro tengo previsto tener tres tarjetas de video en SLI.

Good for amatuers [Posted on 2008-01-30]
Extremely poor documentation, very poor design, poor quality build. Spend another $50 and buy a Lian Li.

Bought this case after reading several favorable reviews by techie sites. I'm not sure what they're smoking as this case is really just not well designed. I was looking for something solid with good airflow and easy access to all parts. What I have instead is a case that's about 3~4" too short. Here's my systems basic configuration.

AMD 4600+ on Asus M2N-E motherboard. Asus 8500GT video card, 3GB RAM, DVD+R/W, FDD, 5 HDD's, Enermax 400W PSU.

I've had it now for nearly 3 weeks and I'm still trying to get everything layed out in the case the best way I can for my use however I'm seriously considering selling it for $50 and buying a Lian Li. First off the fan in bottom is in about the silliest location I can imagine. My Enermax PSU has modular cabling which means that the cables are all sheathed in a nylon wrapper. This makes the cabling somewhat stiff and a little larger in diameter than the norm. So the cabling from the PSU is hitting the fan which you can't seem to relocate to the front of the chassis as the slot on the front is too shallow (e.g. won't fit a 25mm wide fan). Speaking of fans, the case fans use the standard 12v peripherals connectors and not the 3-pin design commonly used for connecting to the motherboad. I've already replaced them with Enlobal 120's (UC-12EB). If you somehow are able to leave the lower fan in place, your power cable for your hard drives has to go up into the motherboard area and then back down to the hard drive bay in the front of the system. The bracket that holds down the PSU barely fits over my Enermax PSU which really isn't big at all. They have been many reports that large PSU's won't fit and I had considered this however the Enermax is really a OEM replacement sized unit so I didn't think this would be an issue. Wrong again. Had to elongate the holes slightly to get the screws to line up. Note that there is no motherboard tray so you're back to completely removing everything one piece at a time. The screws on the rear panel for mounting the cards are recessed in just far enough to make you wonder if the screw is going to strip out during tightening. The side panels are about as flexible as you can get and can't be hard to damage. The aluminum skin is about the thickness of a soda can or possibly flashing metal used around a chimney. The routing for the SATA cables is really, really bad and several have broken their drives controller boards (rendering the drives useless in most cases) due to strain on the SATA fittings. You can read an article on Anandtech which illustrates this.

This is my 9th system build in 15 years and no doubt my worst. All in all I'm extremely disappointed with Antec and this will definitely be the last case I buy from them without actually seeing it in person.

Very well built, but the bottom drive cage is badly designed. [Posted on 2008-02-21]
This is clearly one of the best built cases you can buy for anything near this price. A great deal of attention was paid to the design of many aspects of this otherwise very fine case, but unfortunately the bottom drive cage is very difficult to use. Vertically mounting the drives in the cage is fussier than mounting on the sleds used in the top drive cage, but the real problems are related to cabling. There is very little room between the back of the cage and the fan residing between the cage and the power supply, so routing your cables both up to the motherboard and around to the power supply on the other side of the fan can be difficult.

If Antec had gone with the perpendicular mounting style of the Sonata in this model, it would be an obvious five star case. Not only would that make it easier to insert and remove drives, but it would also free up room between the power supply and the mid-mounted fan, making cabling much less of a problem than it currently is.

OK case [Posted on 2008-04-24]
This thing was a royal pain to install my components in. I hope you have small hands cause i do and they barely fit. Keeps things cool but nothing spectacular. Bottom chassis design makes NO sense at all to me. Why have your main input fan pull air at the bottom of the case when it's isolated from hot cpu and video card above? I suggest putting the input fan in the front middle and put your hard drives in the middle as well. They stay cooler that way. Two out of the three fans don't start to rotate unless i spin them by hand!!! Who has time for that? They do start if you put them on medium but this is supposed to be a quiet case so people want them on low. I put retail antec tri-cool's in there and they work fine. It is quiet but NOT silent as some have said. If you want quiet buy an accelero fanless vga cooler and get an aftermarket cpu heatsink with a tri-cool fan set to low. Many other reviewers love this thing but I just thinks it's OK and not as good as your hoping for. Overall I do like the case, the way it looks and it has room but save yourself some money and get something cheaper.

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