Welcome to my unboxing of a case that is not actually what it appears to be. So,
I wish I could show you guys the correct retail packaging for the Anttech 3002,
but my sample arrived before they actually had, and I'm very sorry that
this uh unboxing is a little late, but before they had a 302 box, or maybe it
didn't. That was my assumption. but inside. So what they've done is they've
double boxed it so that no one involved in the
transportation process could have known
that something so top secret was being shipped via courier and then opened it
up to see the secrets inside.
That's probably not how it went down. Okay, so the 3002
is, as you may or may not be able to figure out on your own, an upgrade to
the enormously successful Anttech 300.
If you've ever gone to a LAN event, what you've probably noticed is that other
than Anttech 900's and 300's, everything
else is kind of like a few here and a few there. Between those two, they are
what you could label sort of the gamer's choice cuz they, especially at the time
they were first introduced, had great features, great build quality, and
very reasonable price points. So, the 3002, actually, I still need this for a
sec. The 3002 ish
the 3002 brings into the year 2012
everything that was good about the 300 before including the value optimized
price point, the excellent cooling options and adds a few things that were
maybe missing with the 300 given how old
of a design that that one was. So, I'm going to show you guys what Antech has
to say for themselves before I get into the case myself. So, up to 12 1/2 in of
expandability. Uh, maximum cooling. We'll cover that later. Uh, ease of use.
So, toolless 3 and 1/2 and 5 and 1/4 in bays.
Front panel USB 3. Uh, that we'll get into more later. A washable PSU air
filter and front intake filter. Eight expansion slots for up to XL ATX
motherboards with eight slots. So this particular one for example, the X79 UD7
does have eight slots, but ones like the Gigabyte Assassin for X58 have nine. So
watch out for that. XLATX is not a real standard. Okay. Side cooling fan, cable
routing holes behind the motherboard tray. Okay, let's have a look at the
outside before we open this baby up. So for one thing, you can see the front has
got a bit of a curved appearance to it. So, don't worry. The bays are still
straight. So, you're going to have that very clean look even if you install
optical drives. You're not going to have, you know, how some cases have like
curved front bezels and then you install a flat optical drive and it looks kind
of goofy because the rest of it's curved and there looks out of place. So, they
haven't done that. They've just done a curved look on the side. Looks very
slick actually. Two USB 3.0 ports. Microphone. Headphones. Reset switch is
very hard to accidentally press. You can see even if I push on it like this, I
can't really press it. You got to get right in there and push it in order to
reset your system. This is awesome because the last thing you want to do is
accidentally reset your system with your knee while you're in the middle of a game. This is a gaming case after all,
so they have to consider things like that. We've got our hard drive cages.
And that's pretty much it for the front. I mean, the Anttech 300 was a very
classic looking case, and they've gone that route again with the 3002. Now,
this is interesting. More on this once we open up the case, but there's a 120
mm cooling fan spot on the motherboard
side of the inside of the case. So, yes.
Yes, more on that later. Yes, indeed. We have a 140 mm cooling fan in the top as
well as a couple water cooling grommets. Although most people probably won't use
these. Hey, you never know. Um, they could.
If you did want to do an external water cooling setup, it's handy to not have to
punch holes in your case or use those horrible PCI bracket passroughs that
usually the tubing doesn't even like fit properly through. So, let's take the
side panel off. Inside, we find it does
not have a black interior, although it's up to the individual user whether or not
that matters. I've always thought it's a little bit silly to do a black interior
on a case that doesn't have a window anyway, but to each his own. Uh oh, we
should look at the back of the case before we wrap up here. So, here are our
eight expansion slots, bottom- mounted power supply, 120 mm cooling fan, as
well as speed adjusters for both this
120 mil fan and the 140 mm fan in the top. These are two cool fans, which
means you have low and high RPM
settings. On the inside of the case, we
find a number of things. So, we find the power supply filter, which actually Oh,
locks in place. Okay, that's kind of handy. There you go. So, you can take
that out, clean it off, put it back in, and it comes out the side. This is a
very smart design decision because when you're set up at your Okay, here. Here,
I'm going to put this where it would be. So, this would be next to my monitor.
And uh so, I got all my cables coming out of the back of the system and my
monitor's here. And so many cases implement the fan filters back here. How
am I going to reach this? My face is in my monitor now. I have to take my case.
I have to hope that I don't pull on my cables too hard. If they put it on the
side, all of a sudden it's much easier for me to get it out. All I have to do
is take my case, angle it a little bit, and I can get it out no problem.
Back to the interior. So, pretty much a no frills interior,
though they've done a nice big CPU cutout. And now, let's talk about this
right here. So, this is a 120 mm cooling
fan spot that's on the other side of the motherboard tray. Why? Why, you may ask?
Well, check out this gaming motherboard. There are actual CPU VRM components on
the back of the motherboard that in
addition to the fact that any modern motherboard has a ton of copper content
in it. So it's is actually conducting a lot of heat away from the CPU just out
here through the PCB itself. If you ever touch the back of a motherboard, it's
quite hot. that allows Anttech 3002 users to install an additional 120 mil
fan back there, use it as an exhaust and pull some of this heat away from the
back of the motherboard. Alternately, I guess you could use it as an intake and blow the air directly at the back of the
motherboard if you want more of a positive air pressure thing going on in
your case to keep dust out. That's not
not really sure how I would do it. I guess since it's got filtered intakes, I
would probably use it as exhaust, but I mean, the choice is yours. So, here are
our three toolless 5 and a/4 inch bays.
And here are the mounting pieces for our
six toolless 3 and 1/2 inch bays. There's actually not a whole lot here in
terms of frills and gimmicks, so I'm not going to bother taking it out. But you got your screws and your hard drive
rails and uh Oh, actually, okay, I will take this out. Give me a sec. Well,
unfortunately, they're not the same ones that were included with the 1100. So,
I'm not going to do the demo where I lift Oh, actually, I guess I can. Okay.
Okay, I don't think they're the same ones, but it's actually fairly secure.
So, once you put these on, all you do is
slide your drive until it locks. There's no screws involved whatsoever, and it's
pretty darn secure once it's in there. Another thing to note about Anttech
cases is even when they have a value case or a budget case or whatever it is
you want to call it, the build quality is always there. And this is not always
true of cases that might look flashier or have more features. And this is this
is just me, Lionus, personally talking to you guys right now. And I want to
just I'm not going to name any names when I talk about their competitors, but
not all of Ant's competitors would have built the 3 and 1/2 in hard drive cage
like this. See the way they have folded over the metal so that there's
absolutely no chance of any kind of a rough edge. Not only does that improve
the uh the usability of the case by making it safer, it also adds structural
strength to it. The other thing they've done is this is just a design thing.
It's not like the metal's more expensive, but the way they've done the cutouts here also gives this an enormous
amount of strength. I have seen cases damaged in shipping to the point where
this is bent so much that a hard drive slid in here would just fall right out
or like go to the side because it doesn't even catch on these rails
anymore. But I really have never seen that with an antec. So there you go,
guys. Uh SSD mount. We've got a 2 and
1/2 in SSD mount in the bottom. Uh, personally, I would prefer to have seen
a toolless uh 3 and 1/2 in mechanism that allows you to install more SSDs,
but it's not the end of the world. And it looks like we've got another SSD
mount on the other side of the motherboard tray. So, you can put you
can put that one hiding this one. I like I like hiding SSDs behind the
motherboard. That's awesome. So, uh, what else we got here? Oh, let's look at
the front fan filter. I haven't even shown that yet. So, there's a couple clips here on the front. I'm going to go
ahead and pull that off. So, a front fan filter is
here. Yes, there we go.
Comes off somehow. Oh, there we go. So, it's just these
little clips right here. And you pull it out like that. There we go. So, that can be cleaned fairly quickly, fairly
easily. Pop that back in place. Once I
figured out how to do it, that's actually quite quick.
Pop this back on. Oh, these go into the hinge first.
There we go. And I think that pretty
much covers it. Is there anything I'm missing? So, we already covered the 12 1/2 in thingamabber. Oh, right. The
cable management on the back. And Slick's gone ahead and turned it so that
he can see it so he could remind me of something. But, uh, I have a cheat sheet
over there as well.
Aha. So, there you go. Aha. Cable management. So, cable management is
something where the 3002 just blows away its predecessor. Look at
this. 3 cm of space on the back of the motherboard tray. That means you can
actually route a 24 pin cable without any hassle. You've got one, two, three.
We could call that a cable management spot. I could potentially call that a
cable management spot. Okay, it's going to be hard to count these, but four
major ones. And then you can see they've got this extra room up here for your
eight pin right there. And then they've also got a little one here for front
audio or USB 3 or whatever else. Uh, speaking of which, the included cables
are right here. So, it does have an internal USB 3 header for those two USB
3 front ports. Very high quality cable, actually. That's good to see. And then,
hey, look at this. Hey, hey, black and gray, which happens to be the color
scheme of the case. Power reset and front panel switches. And there's our
front panel audio. So, that's the kind of thing I would run through here in
order to uh make it more more hidden.
Also, cable management spots on the back. You can use the included zip ties
to There we go. Anchor your cables to these
and then tie them up tight so that when you put the other side panel back on,
you don't have any trouble fitting it into place. I think that pretty much
wraps up the 3002 for me. Don't forget
to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer
videos. And I do have one more thing to say. Check this out. They thought of
everything. There's a vent right here. So that means that whether you're doing
intake or exhaust, the air is actually going to have somewhere to go um on that
fan that's on the back of the motherboard tray. Yeah. Don't forget to
subscribe.