it baffles me how i could have gone so long without ever unboxing an antec 300
so here we are today it's not a new product by any stretch of the
imagination but we have the antec 300 it
is SSD hard drive compatible which it wasn't when it was first released this
is a fairly old sku but still very popular and uh okay so they're calling
it a versatile minitar you know like i even featured it in a uh
in an airflow optimization guide a while back i just must have maybe i shot an
unboxing and never actually uploaded it either way picture of the case on the
side filtered front panel takes in air efficiently and prevents dust buildup
that's good okay we've got our features and specs on the side here and let's
just go ahead and start getting this open so the antec 300 if you go to any
kind of a lan party there's a couple cases that you're to see just a ton of
you're going to see a ton of 900s you're going to see a ton of 300s this is a
very very common common case because it provides you
gamer type features
such as optimized airflow mesh fronts
at a price point that is very very attractive
all right so the first thing we find when we open up the box is antex characteristically
excellent packaging here you go so you can see they're using
a closed cell foam that is going to protect your case from any damage that
could potentially occur in transit so you've got a good
inch plus of foam on all sides of the chassis very very nice to see that we've
got some documentation in here including a user's manual and yeah this should
give you some idea how old the box design is despite its eminently portable
frame the 300 has enough room for an NVIDIA 8800 series graphics card how
impressive we're up to the gtx 500 series at this point so we're
several generations away from uh
when an NVIDIA 8800 series was uh a
concern whether it would fit in your case or not
uh it goes to show you that the development cycles for cases are not
quite as fast as they are for graphics cards nor do they need to be if you have
a well featured classic looking suitcase
then you don't really need to redo it for quite some time
all right here it is the 300 so you find first of
all the mesh front you've got three five and a quarter inch bays and then you
have dual 120 millimeter intakes in the
front of the case so these are filtered intakes although i'm not actually sure how the
filters come out for this particular one it does not come pre-loaded with fans
there but at least it does give you the option of adding them so that you have
airflow going directly over your graphics cards
or graphics card i guess if you don't run two which most people don't
from the front of the chassis nice thumb screws those nice wide thumb
screws so it's easier to get a grip on them than the uh than the smaller head
thumb screws we're gonna take the side panels off so the side panels use a
pretty standard finish it's not quite that super matte finish but it's also
not glossy so it's going to be fairly fingerprint resistant but not perfect
i mean if you keep your case reasonably clean it's not really a concern on the
side you can see we've got a punch out for a 120 millimeter fan so that's gonna
blow directly over your graphics card so it's all about graphics card cooling the
way i would probably set this case up for optimal cooling would be two 120
millimeters as intakes in the front and then i would set this one right here
up as an exhaust because most cards these days i mean it depends what you're
using but if you have an NVIDIA reference card for example it's going to
be drawing air in on this side and kicking it out on this side so you want
to you want to help it rather than work against it so let's look at the inside
of the case as you can see it's a fairly basic
uh chassis in terms of its construction we've got one two three four five
six five three and a half inch drive bays we have our SSD mount here at the
bottom so you can see they've retrofitted it with that so you're just
gonna screw these in from the bottom you can mount one SSD here and it can still
support its full complement of three and a half inch drives even if you do that
there are the mounts for your five and a quarter inch so there's no tool-less uh
stuff going on in this chassis it's very basic i mean tool-less if you're only
going to build the system once isn't that big of a deal it's only if you're
doing frequent modding you're going to want to consider maybe getting a higher end chassis such as the 900 which uses
thumb screws to mount the drives for example all right here we've got our
motherboard tray which features a nice big cutout so no matter where your
motherboard positions the CPU socket you shouldn't have any problems swapping out
a CPU cooler even if uh
you have a back plate on the back of it so you can just take that off and you don't have to take out the motherboard
or anything like that here's power for our top 140 millimeter
fan we've got all of our front leads for the front power switch front lights
actually what do we have on the front of this case let's have a look so we have
two front usb 2 ports we have a microphone port headphone port
and a power switch oh okay there's a reset switch in there so it's hard to
hit by accident that's a really uh thoughtful feature actually
all right motherboard mount you've got room for your standard atx motherboards
uh you're not going to get much longer you're not going to get much wider it's got your standard seven pci slots bottom
mounted power supply this is one of the first value chassis that did offer the
feature of the bottom mounted power supply remember ntec did pioneer that
with the p180 at least on the mainstream i mean
there's always a modder who's done it before someone else but
they were the first ones who brought a mass production case to market with a
bottom mounted power supply okay we've got a 120 millimeter fan in the back
that comes pre-populated with a 120 millimeter fan this is one of their
tri-cool fans so you can set it to low medium or high uh the one on top is
actually not a tri-pool so that one runs at full
speed regardless so the total fans that you can populate in this case are 140 up
in the top 120 in the back and then two more 120s in the front as intakes
all right in terms of accessories there's not a
whole lot going on here this is our entire accessory box
thumb screws other screws
that's it so if you want you know fancy add-ons
then look elsewhere i suppose
cable management so we've got a little we've got little
zip ties back here for managing cables on the side of the drive cage so this
will allow you to hide your cables if you're using a non-modular power supply
you can just bundle them all up here tie them down and that would probably be the
best way to go about that so i think that's pretty much all i have to say
about the 300 i don't think i ever showed a view from the back so that's
what it looks like if you haven't seen one before don't forget to subscribe to
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