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Initial Impressions

The Aria is light for a case - I think the chassis is steel and not aluminum however as there are aluminum towers that are not much more than the 10 pound mark. Antec has definitely taken cues from established SFF trends with the Cube shape; and I would classify the look as traditional. Antec scores points with the color scheme; the silver side panels and the glossy front makes for an attractive combination. The front does have a definite plastic look to it so it will not be mistaken for a painted finish but is done well nonetheless. Antec foregoes the route of stealthing I/O connectors, a practice I find a bit silly especially for often used connectors like headphone jacks and the like which means the door used for the stealthing is likely to be open anyway.

The optical drive bay is stealthed and it uses a system that we have seen with the AOpen and Soltek cubes where an external button on the case itself presses against the CDROM eject button. This is system is not perfect however as we have found that some CDROMs do not have the buttons in the same place and therefore, the external button does not trigger the door. Antec however, designed around this problem by making the stealthed door removable; those with optical drives with funny buttons will be able to access the button directly. With a black optical drive, the front panel does not look too off, but those with beige ones may want to think about replacing it. A huge fan that serves both as the exhaust for the powersupply and the inside of the case is found on the back of the Aria. The power supply does not have a kill switch like most regular power supplies.

The Aria also comes with a manual, a driver CD, a power cord, a blower and a rounded IDE cable. The driver CD is for the MMC reader up front and the blower is an optional component that sits in the adjacent PCI slot to help cool the videocard. I'm not a big fan of the blower type mechanisms as I find that they usually do not sit underneath the GPU core but your mileage may vary. The inclusion of the rounded cable is a nice touch. Most motherboards come with a single rounded IDE cable nowadays and dealing with a flat IDE cable for the optical drive is not as pleasant in a smaller enclosure like the Aria.

The Aria is powered by 300Ws