today we'll be doing an unboxing and overview of the antech dark Fleet df8
this is a full tower chassis and uh why don't we do a quick overview of the
features that it includes first of all you have a 2 and 1/2 in SSD slot right
in the top of the drive this runs at your full SATA speed whatever you hook
up to it so that's a pretty neat feature if you want to plug an SSD into the
front of your case and then we've also got four external 3 and 1/2 in Fleet
swap SATA drive Bays so these are hot swap SATA base that you can actually
move around within the case much like the antech 1200 you can actually take
the whole module and move it somewhere else if you want these except 3 and 1/2
in drives and then we have Fleet release Drive Bay access does fleet release
basically is a name for their door that
includes a fan a fan control knob a stepless fan control knob so you can
have the fan run at any speed you want as well as a fan filter this gives you
access to the hard drive Bays as well as the fleet swap Bay B next we have USB
3.0 on the front a single port and it is
sssd hard drive compatible it is designed by antech and California and
what else do we have on the outside of the box that I can tell you about
there's a picture of the case I don't think that's all that relevant then
we've got a big long list of specs cameraman if you want to just have a look at the spec list they can always
pause it and have a look if they feel like it three front USB 2.0 ports that's
probably relevant as well as the one USB 3.0 port color coded blue uh CPU cutout
for easy CPU installation and oh it
accepts CPX power supplies that's pretty relevant too cuz ANC cp850 and cp1000
are both really good units at a really good price so let's get this thing
opened up this is my cheat sheet today by the way because there's a lot of
stuff to remember about this case and uh from time to time I do actually try to
learn about the product before I unbox it rather than just trying to learn on
camera look at this I I prepared everything today I've got got a knife
I've got my screwdriver and I even have an SSD drive to put into the little SSD
slot that is preparation so first thing
we find inside the box is a piece of
paper are you even able to hear me you can hear me okay so we find a piece of
paper that tells us this is a product overview and we've also got some screws
okay why don't we just open this up and see what's
inside okay product overview will'll only provide general
information uh shows you what all the where all the fans are and stuff and
then yeah okay oh hey hey hey this is cool okay so there's an SSD Mount I'll
show you that once we get inside the case and then next we have some hard
drive grommets we got some thumb screws motherboard screws Drive screws as well
as a couple reusable cable ties thank you antech cable ties are always a plus
on a new case and I can't get this out so I'm going to use the old trick uh
flip it upside down and there we
go roll
and wow it comes in really good foam I'll give it that
much this is a high quality closed cell
foam you can be assured that your antec DF 85 will not be damaged in transit
you've got a good inch plus of packing material on all sides and you can see
that it arrived in very good condition when it was uh shipped to
ncx all right let's get the plastic off
here and the first thing you'll notice is that it's pretty similar in structure
to the antech 1200 so it's been upgraded in a lot of
ways but the general shape is quite um
reminds me quite a bit of the antech 1200 including the side window here so
it does have a side window which has an optional 120 mm fan mount for a graphics
card fan then we have a uh some thumb
screws on the back so I'm just going to get this opened up so we can have a good
look at it why don't we do the rest of the outside first so here I'll take that
off then we'll take off the inside one in a little bit here but let's have a
look at the fleet release as well as Fleet swap Bay
so first of all these are the fleet rele
oh man I can't even remember which is Fleet release and which is Fleet swap
help me okay these are the fleet release Bay so these open up
somehow okay let's see if we can figure out how to do it that would be the key
is to figure out how to open them there
has to be a way and it can't be all that complicated because you can't call
something like Fleet like like fast like Swift unless you're okay well that was
easy does this just come out like that no well these are easy so these are just
covers for your 5 and 1/4 in Bays okay
so there we go we've got that much figured out and then we have okay why
don't I try try opening up the side panel first and see if I can figure out how to get these open so side panel has
a nice Clear Window on it one of the things that they have updated since the
1200 is this is no longer mesh this is now Plexi so you can actually see
through the entire window you've got anti vibration mounts here for the side
VGA fan so that's pretty good let's go
ahead and put that in
there there we go and let's see if we can figure out how to open up these Bays
here so first let's take this and do
that oh wonder what this does does that
unlock them not yet oh okay oh it does it
unlocks them oh there we go okay so all
of the fleet release bays are locked by
default and then you just open them up
just like that I'm guessing they become a little bit easier to open as time goes
on uh but yeah there that's not that
complicated so now we have access to all
of the of the fans these are washable fan filters in here 120 mm fans you can
see these are antech 3speed fans they are LED fans so those are red LEDs on
red fans with a black frame so they look pretty cool when they're lit up I'll
make a point of actually lighting up this case uh at some point in the future
so I can show it to you guys the other thing that ante is really touting as a
cool feature on this case is the step fan control right here which is built in
to all of the front fans and here is the
other really really cool one and this is Fleet swap so right back here you have
to look inside the case you can see that there are two only two I thought there
were more well there are two front SATA
hot swaps that you can actually move to
any two SATA ports that you want in the front and there are actually Four I lied
the other two are up here by default so you can move these around however you
want actually cameraman if you want to hear come have a look at them from the
inside you can see that the screws right here can allow you to just remove these
they're made of plastic but fairly durable and then you can just put them
wherever you want so you can configure it so that the hot swap bays are
wherever you need them to be they all used separate power and data cables so
there's no Port multiplier involved there's no uh there's no power uh
routing from sort of one plug to multiple ports or anything like that but
it does give you a very flexible very modular interface for your drives very
cool let's have a look at what we've got for front panel connectors
here okay oh it's tied with two zip ties
for extra added Safety
and Security okay so for our front panel
connectors we have a USB 3 which is intended to go around to the back of
your motherboard so that'll give you front USB 3 cuz the uh the pin out is
not yet decided for the USB 3 standard so if you want a front USB 3 that's all
you can really do is run it around to the back of the case so then the next
thing we've got is our front USB 2.0 reset switch another front USB 2.0 then
we have the front uh SATA which I will show you in a little bit more detail in
a moment we have power for the front we have front HD audio we have front ac97
audio should we so desire we have a hard drive LED and I'm going to go ahead and
assume there's a power switch in there somewhere but I can't find it for the life of me power
LED come on power
switch okay we got this one this one this one
and power switch got it excellent so at
the back there are two more 120 mm fans these match the color scheme of the 120
mm in the front so all in all actually
that's one of the probably the best values about this case is the fact that
it comes with seven fans by default all
pre-loaded into the case and they're all reasonably good quality fans too these
are all antech Tri cools I actually don't know if the one's up top or yeah
yeah those are Tri cools too and so all the ones at the back are controlled by
switches at the back of the case so if I can get the cameraman to come have a
look at the back here you can see that the rear fans are controlled by these
switches so they can be set to either low or high and these are sliders oo
that's cool so you can adjust them to whatever speed you want by the look of
things although I could be wrong so don't quote me on that one so it might
just be low high uh that one's kind of
recessed but you can probably still hit it the top ones are right here so that
controls all the fans at the back now one disadvantage is that if you want to
replace the fans with something else it might be a little tricky to get them to
actually work this way here is our standard I/O plate location then we have
1 2 3 4 5 6 seven expansion slots so
you're going to fit standard ATX motherboards here are two water cooling
grommet so if you wanted to mount a rear radiator or anything like that you'd run
the tubes through there then you've got your standard ATX power supply hole and
then you can also remove these four screws and that allows you to mount a
CPX power supply let's have a look around the back of the case and see if
we can find any interesting cable routing features or anything like that
let me see cameraman's pointing at something I don't know what I don't know
what he's on about he's pointing at the
front 5 and 1/4 in Baye Maybe maybe he
wants me to talk about the 5 and a/4 inch P oh I haven't forgotten that now he's pointing at something that I had
totally hadn't forgotten he's trying to remind me of stuff that I know silly
cameraman trickst are for kids now he's shaking his head at
me that cameraman guy him in his Mac see
he wouldn't use something like this because it's not you know an Apple so
you know he doesn't understand that you know why this would be interesting uh so
here's your power okay come back
so here's your power power supply cable routing holes you've uh you got your
power supply mounted in the bottom so you can run your 24 pin here you run
your eight pin up here you run uh um
whatever they're called Power connector SATA up here for the optical drives and
then you can run any SATA cables you want over to your hard drives over here
and then you can also oh you know what this is something else that I should mention I think that antech saying you
can actually install another one of these if you you don't want any Optical
drives and you can just have four fans in the front so I I don't know where you
buy them but I think that you can so
that might be relevant here's the CPU cutout nice and big but without losing
any sturdiness you can see they've peeled back the metal here so that the
edges are all rounded I could rub my fingers on these all day and I would not
get a cut see I didn't get a cut I was hoping I wouldn't get a cut and then
let's see the last thing that I want to talk about is the 140 mm fans on the top
those look a little bit bigger than one I think they're 140 mil oh yeah they're
140 mil no I'm I'm I'm just crazy yeah these are 140 mm fans Tri cools also
they spin just like that and then the last thing that I finally want to show
you is let's actually use the hot spot
Bay I'm just going to take a wd 1 TB
black hard drive and I'm going to plug it in and then that is how long it takes
to install a hard drive in the dark Fleet 85 once you've already plugged in
the connectors at the back of the fleet swap uh modular interface things that
you can move around and finally the real last thing I want to show you because I
lied last time so here's the power cable that comes up from the power supply and
then here's a SATA cable that we plugged in in theory when we were installing our
system and you can plug in it
SSD now I don't know that this is the
most secure way to install an SSD in your system but I will let you be the
judge of that uh the way that I see this being more useful is actually just if
you store your data on just a regular 2 and 1/2 in Notebook hard drive and you
just want to sort of quickly plug it in instead of you know hauling out a USB
cable or whatever then this would be a really easy way to plug that in or I
mean hey if you wanted your like if you wanted your SSD on display for the world
you know hey look at me look how cool I am I have a 128 gig SSD yo then it's all
clear so you