Antec P193 Review - PAGE 2

Installation in the P193 is taken to a new level of simplicity, the case incorporates multiple mounting options for motherboards. The cage array is the same as the P180, offering 6 dedicated 3.5" drives, 1 3.5" floppy drive, and 4 5.25" drives. Keeping to tradition the cage allows for easy mounting and swapping of drives using removable trays for all 6 drives, and the 5.25" drives use a pressure clip system for quick maintenance from the front of the case.

For those using water systems the case incorporates space for that as well in the back plate with two spots for coolant hoses to pass through and plenty of space for mounting a pump, reservoir and more within the case and the available drive bays.

The P193 seems to come out as the one stop solution case for builders: quick expansion panels from the lower level of the case, extremely handy cable management locations make it easy to work around, and effective cooling require no investment to keep things cool.

The only thing that seems to hurt for function is that the main mesh panels aren't easy to remove without removing the entire filter door. There's a pressure tab on the top of each door so that you can take them off, but it was a bit nicer being able to manually remove each filter for cleaning. They seemed to have thought about that factor when including the filter for the 200mm fan on the sidepanel so the shift does make one wonder why it was lost in regard to the front and even exhaust fans.

For our installation I loaded the system up with 5 drives, 1 DVD drive and a 650W PSU -- and even with all that it feels like an empty case with all the free space. Which is great, as the single drive in the upper rack doesn't pass all that much warmth into the 3850 and the lower cage drives simply pass the heat through the bottom chamber into the PSU which is dispersed quickly enough. Overall the system maintained balanced temps given the 4 drive arrangement on the bottom rack with no intake cooling as we'll see in the following page.