Antec Dark Fleet DF-85 Closer Look & nVidia GeForce 3D Vision Surround Build Inside Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,606 words · ~8 min read
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well I promised I'd do a bit of a followup to the antech dark Fleet 885
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and here it is I spent some time tonight doing a build inside it so I've actually
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put my uh my 3D Vision surround rig which was on my high-speed PC tech
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station and I went and put it into the dark Fleet 85 so there's a couple topics
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I didn't really cover in enough detail when I did my initial unboxing uh the
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first one of which is these these are not a very good idea uh
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because because it's just a random door
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that you need to open in order to get at your CD ROM drive like it's not
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automatic or anything you can't just press the button and then
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like it'll open it's just yeah I'm I'm pretty amazed that
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that made it onto this case um one other
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thing that I didn't talk about before or that I had wrong was that you just push
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uh here in order to open the fleet swap Bays I was kind of forcing them but yeah
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you just push on this side it releases this latch right here that is how to get
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them open another thing that I should have showed you before was the fan
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filters these are pretty clever so they
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just go right onto each fan you pull out the little tab right here just pull that
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out pull it up clean it out and then you
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just slide it right back in so that's a pretty cool feature of this case uh one
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other thing I didn't really talk about enough was the fleet swap Baye so here
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I'm going to go ahead and open up all of the uh all the doors and I'm going to
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look inside and I hope there's enough light for you to see in there but B ouch
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H myself on the fan okay so here are the
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fleet swap uh back planes here and
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um there aren't a whole lot of places you can put them unfortunately the so
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that's sort of the bad news because anywhere next to these video cards
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actually I'll talk more about that on the side I guess uh so Fleet swap Bas So
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in theory I guess you could could install uh if you bought more of these
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or if you just slid hard drive straight in you could install up 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
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nine hard drives which would be a pretty tremendous capacity but then if you come
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around to the side you run into a bit of a
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problem just going to go ahead and pull the side panel
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off the case looks great with the red lights by the way looks really good I
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mean no product is perfect though so um the problem you run into here is that
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the fleet swap Bays add so much bulk to the drive cages that you can install
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them anywhere near the graphics cards I mean these aren't terribly long graphics
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cards these are GTX 480s they're only about 9 in Long there are cards that are
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longer on the market and already they'd be right up against the SATA interfaces
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on the fleet swap base and actually I mean because you have to Route four
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cables to it two SATA data two SATA power um you'd end up with most of it
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being blocked by the 24 pin connector up here and this is the top slot and then
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even down at the bottom you'd end up I mean I'm using a modular power supply um
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but it has a fair number of pre-attached cables and you've end up with kind of a
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clutter here and then on the other side
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these are so full of uh cables that you wouldn't be able to slide hard drives in
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there anyway and then you can't use any of the ones in between so the fleet swap
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um brackets are a bit of a Miss I think but the good news is that you can
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install hard drives without them you just slide them in and then you gain
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that extra inch and a bit almost of space and you can just plug the cables
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directly into the backs of the hard drives uh just like with the antech 1200
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so what else did I want to talk about on this case I really like the fans uh
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they've haven't really changed the way the fan management is done versus the
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1200 you can change all of the fan speeds around here at the back with that
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little panel up there next to this fan so you can switch them from high to low
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and vice versa and I believe the fans actually get brighter when you change
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the switches I'm having trouble finding one that gets brighter for me but they
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do they do um you can install a fairly
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long power supply you can see I've got a Quattro 1200 in here and what else did I
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want to talk about uh Fair number of front panel
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connectors you can see I've got them routed through that hole right
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there uh it fits very very tall CPU heat
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sinks I've actually got a CO gauge arrow in here right now and even with the heat
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pipes sticking up right there you can see we've still got uh maybe a
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centimeter or centimeter and a half of space left once we close a side panel so
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that's pretty good
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um what else did I want to talk about on this case yeah I wouldn't have minded
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seeing a little bit more in terms of cable management on the back right now
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you don't really have a whole lot of options is the bad news because I mean
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basically everything has to come from just going to lose the strap here cuz
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it's making it hard for me to hold the camera basically everything has to come
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from this hole right here and you've
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only got about well here you've got this much space between the motherboard back
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plate and then where the side panel goes on so it's not even like if you compare
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the thickness of of a 24 pin power connector to the thickness you have here
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you can't you can't even really route any cables behind the motherboard tray
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and expect to be able to close the case so by the time you run an 8 pin up to
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the CPU a 24 pin over here some SATA
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cables up to your Optical Bay potentially some SATA cables over to
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your Fleet swaps some Molex to your front fans some Molex to your rear fans
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uh you run all of your front panel connectors including your USB your
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audio um you kind of wind up in a little bit
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of trouble and what I wish had been included because you see all this space
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here like this is quite this is quite deep the space behind the hard drive
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cages um I wish something like that could have been turned into a place to
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hide cables because right now you see there's actually there's no Gap here
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there's no way to bring cables from the power supply up into here everything has
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to has to pass over this uh this lip of
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metal here where um really there's not enough space to close the panel over top
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of it so that was one of the challenges that I ran into with this case one thing
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that I did like though was that the back CPU Cooler uh access is very well
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positioned for my motherboard here I have easy access to the uh the back
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plate of the CPU Cooler I'm using right now and I'll be able to easily swap that
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out if I should so desire anyway thank
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you for checking out my more detailed look at the antec dark Fleet 85 I've got
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my SSD installed here and uh since it's
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just a direct SATA hookup it's obviously running at full speed so I've got
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Windows running and um yeah I think that
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pretty much covers everything oh yeah there's the front slots so we got reset
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3 USB 2.0 One USB 3.0 front audio and
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power oh yeah yeah yeah yeah I should show you how to hook up the USB 3.0 so I
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ran my USB 3.0 cable behind the motherboard up here okay up here under
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the video cards and then out the back panel through a little plate that they
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provide okay so you can see it uh right
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here and then I just plug that into the USB
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3.0 port on the back of the motherboard that's the way all USB 3.0
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implementations work right now because there is no standardized pinout so uh
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you pretty much have to run a standard USB cable plug around to the back of
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your case there's no other real way to do it right now thank you for watching
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