well I promised I'd do a bit of a followup to the antech dark Fleet 885
and here it is I spent some time tonight doing a build inside it so I've actually
put my uh my 3D Vision surround rig which was on my high-speed PC tech
station and I went and put it into the dark Fleet 85 so there's a couple topics
I didn't really cover in enough detail when I did my initial unboxing uh the
first one of which is these these are not a very good idea uh
because because it's just a random door
that you need to open in order to get at your CD ROM drive like it's not
automatic or anything you can't just press the button and then
like it'll open it's just yeah I'm I'm pretty amazed that
that made it onto this case um one other
thing that I didn't talk about before or that I had wrong was that you just push
uh here in order to open the fleet swap Bays I was kind of forcing them but yeah
you just push on this side it releases this latch right here that is how to get
them open another thing that I should have showed you before was the fan
filters these are pretty clever so they
just go right onto each fan you pull out the little tab right here just pull that
out pull it up clean it out and then you
just slide it right back in so that's a pretty cool feature of this case uh one
other thing I didn't really talk about enough was the fleet swap Baye so here
I'm going to go ahead and open up all of the uh all the doors and I'm going to
look inside and I hope there's enough light for you to see in there but B ouch
H myself on the fan okay so here are the
fleet swap uh back planes here and
um there aren't a whole lot of places you can put them unfortunately the so
that's sort of the bad news because anywhere next to these video cards
actually I'll talk more about that on the side I guess uh so Fleet swap Bas So
in theory I guess you could could install uh if you bought more of these
or if you just slid hard drive straight in you could install up 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
nine hard drives which would be a pretty tremendous capacity but then if you come
around to the side you run into a bit of a
problem just going to go ahead and pull the side panel
off the case looks great with the red lights by the way looks really good I
mean no product is perfect though so um the problem you run into here is that
the fleet swap Bays add so much bulk to the drive cages that you can install
them anywhere near the graphics cards I mean these aren't terribly long graphics
cards these are GTX 480s they're only about 9 in Long there are cards that are
longer on the market and already they'd be right up against the SATA interfaces
on the fleet swap base and actually I mean because you have to Route four
cables to it two SATA data two SATA power um you'd end up with most of it
being blocked by the 24 pin connector up here and this is the top slot and then
even down at the bottom you'd end up I mean I'm using a modular power supply um
but it has a fair number of pre-attached cables and you've end up with kind of a
clutter here and then on the other side
these are so full of uh cables that you wouldn't be able to slide hard drives in
there anyway and then you can't use any of the ones in between so the fleet swap
um brackets are a bit of a Miss I think but the good news is that you can
install hard drives without them you just slide them in and then you gain
that extra inch and a bit almost of space and you can just plug the cables
directly into the backs of the hard drives uh just like with the antech 1200
so what else did I want to talk about on this case I really like the fans uh
they've haven't really changed the way the fan management is done versus the
1200 you can change all of the fan speeds around here at the back with that
little panel up there next to this fan so you can switch them from high to low
and vice versa and I believe the fans actually get brighter when you change
the switches I'm having trouble finding one that gets brighter for me but they
do they do um you can install a fairly
long power supply you can see I've got a Quattro 1200 in here and what else did I
want to talk about uh Fair number of front panel
connectors you can see I've got them routed through that hole right
there uh it fits very very tall CPU heat
sinks I've actually got a CO gauge arrow in here right now and even with the heat
pipes sticking up right there you can see we've still got uh maybe a
centimeter or centimeter and a half of space left once we close a side panel so
that's pretty good
um what else did I want to talk about on this case yeah I wouldn't have minded
seeing a little bit more in terms of cable management on the back right now
you don't really have a whole lot of options is the bad news because I mean
basically everything has to come from just going to lose the strap here cuz
it's making it hard for me to hold the camera basically everything has to come
from this hole right here and you've
only got about well here you've got this much space between the motherboard back
plate and then where the side panel goes on so it's not even like if you compare
the thickness of of a 24 pin power connector to the thickness you have here
you can't you can't even really route any cables behind the motherboard tray
and expect to be able to close the case so by the time you run an 8 pin up to
the CPU a 24 pin over here some SATA
cables up to your Optical Bay potentially some SATA cables over to
your Fleet swaps some Molex to your front fans some Molex to your rear fans
uh you run all of your front panel connectors including your USB your
audio um you kind of wind up in a little bit
of trouble and what I wish had been included because you see all this space
here like this is quite this is quite deep the space behind the hard drive
cages um I wish something like that could have been turned into a place to
hide cables because right now you see there's actually there's no Gap here
there's no way to bring cables from the power supply up into here everything has
to has to pass over this uh this lip of
metal here where um really there's not enough space to close the panel over top
of it so that was one of the challenges that I ran into with this case one thing
that I did like though was that the back CPU Cooler uh access is very well
positioned for my motherboard here I have easy access to the uh the back
plate of the CPU Cooler I'm using right now and I'll be able to easily swap that
out if I should so desire anyway thank
you for checking out my more detailed look at the antec dark Fleet 85 I've got
my SSD installed here and uh since it's
just a direct SATA hookup it's obviously running at full speed so I've got
Windows running and um yeah I think that
pretty much covers everything oh yeah there's the front slots so we got reset
3 USB 2.0 One USB 3.0 front audio and
power oh yeah yeah yeah yeah I should show you how to hook up the USB 3.0 so I
ran my USB 3.0 cable behind the motherboard up here okay up here under
the video cards and then out the back panel through a little plate that they
provide okay so you can see it uh right
here and then I just plug that into the USB
3.0 port on the back of the motherboard that's the way all USB 3.0
implementations work right now because there is no standardized pinout so uh
you pretty much have to run a standard USB cable plug around to the back of
your case there's no other real way to do it right now thank you for watching
don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech tips for more Tech tips and just plain
Tech and sometimes my cats