Antec Skeleton Review - PAGE 3

The design of the case is an open air system with a 250mm fan blowing down on the mainboard with another 92mm fan on the bottom throwing air across the HDD cage. For the most part it seems like this would be a fairly ineffective system as it would largely depend on room temps; but instead, the unit actually manages to throw down a volume of air that keeps it relatively stable throughout the testing we gave it, in fact the fluctuations were pretty minimal.

For those familiar with Antec fans, they incorporated a tri-cool fan using a tri-color LED system to provide a variety of hues as the fan spins on. The control system for the main fan is easily accessible and even at full speed it's relatively silent. Below are some stats on how the case held up in idle, gaming and synthetic bench scenarios, often was it that on this test system the temps for browsing and media playback were only mildly elevated from idle reports.

Operating Temperatures

Configuration: AMD Athlon X2 4800+ (2.4GHz) (Silent Boost K8), Foxconn nForce 4 Ultra motherboard, ATI Radeon HD3850 (709MHz / 939MHz)

Running the system on medium seemed to slightly increase the fan noise but didn't provide very strong results. Cranking things up to high provided slightly more noise, but better results due to the increased CFM from the fan across the components. The steady temperatures that the high RPM setting could keep things down to was worth it as the CPU fan was still cruising at 1600RPM the entire time.