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Antec’s P160 ATX Case

Andy Brown
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Manufacturer Antec
Model P160
Price (street) $114
Availability Now

ANTEC CASES AND I GO BACK a long way. I purchased their KS-188 full tower back in January of 1999, and since then I’ve always housed my main machine in an Antec case. Currently, I’m using an SX-1030 to house my components.

Needless to say, it didn’t take much convincing to get me to look at one of Antec’s latest offerings, the P160. The sleek lines and aluminum construction are a nice start, but does this new case have the features and innovation that we’ve come to expect from Antec? We’ll soon find out.

Looking outside the box
We’ll start off with a nice overall view of the case.

The P160 is a study in silver, with its aluminum panels highlighted by a front bezel with a chrome finish on the borders. If you saw this design on a classic beige computer case, you might think it looked boxy, but the aluminum panels complement the design. The result is a package that says “function before fashion” yet still manages to look good in an understated way.

The two circles near the top of the left panel are the latches that secure the panel. To remove the panel, grab the two vertical handles in the circle and turn them a quarter turn clockwise, then pull the top of the panel out and lift it off.

Look closely at the rear latch, and you’ll see a small circle in the middle of the handle. This is the keyhole for the case lock. It’s a small thing, but the “circle within a circle” design is a nice touch.

Let’s look at the front and back of the case.

Two of the 5.25″ bays have special covers designed to hide optical drives. Anyone who’s ever seen an aluminum case with a beige CD-ROM drive will appreciate these. We’ll look at the operation of these covers in more detail later on. In the same vein, one of the external 3.5″ bays has a cover designed to hide a floppy drive. At the bottom of the case, there are several large openings for fresh air intake. A blue LED is mounted at the top of each of these openings to provide an indirect lighting effect. Later on, we’ll see what it looks like.

The first thing you’ll notice when looking at the back of the case is the gaping hole where a power supply should be. Antec does not ship the P160 with a power supply unit. The good and bad sides of this arrangement are obvious: You can choose whatever power supply you’d like to use, but you have to purchase it separately. Obviously, Antec is targeting the P160 at the type of consumer who wants to handpick every component that goes into his system. For review purposes, Antec thoughtfully shipped us one of their TrueBlue 480 PSUs.

The second thing you’ll notice on the back of the case is the very large mounting point for a very large fan. Because it was designed with quiet in mind, the P160 uses 120mm fan ports. The larger 120mm fans can move more air while spinning at a slower speed than their 80mm counterparts, allowing for good cooling with significantly reduced noise.

This is a close-up of the top of the front bezel. (I apologize for the hotspots; taking pictures of chrome finishes is no fun.) There is a Firewire port on the far left, then two USB 2.0 ports and the reset button. It’s impossible to see in the photo, but just to the right of the reset button is an LED temperature display. I’ll show you a picture of the display in operation later on. To the right of the LED display are microphone in and headphone out ports, followed finally by the power button. Barely visible between the headphone jack and the power button are a red LED to indicate hard drive access, and a green LED to indicate system power.

If you look to the far left of the picture, you’ll see a small button. You’ll also see that the ports and the like are actually mounted on a cylinder. This cylinder rotates from a position that places the ports parallel with the front of the case to one that has them facing up at a 45 degree angle. The cylinder locks into place at either end of its travel, and the button releases it. The end result is that you can have the ports face straight out if you have the case on top of your desk, or face up if you have the case on the floor.

 
Inside edition
Now that we’ve taken a good look at the exterior of the case, let’s pop that side panel off and see what lurks within.

Here’s a nice overview of the inside of the P160. A couple of things jump out immediately. One is the internal 3.5″ drive bays, which face toward the side of the case rather than the front. Another is the Molex connector mounted above those drive bays, which looks to supply power to the aforementioned LEDs in the front bezel.

These are the connectors for the Firewire and audio ports we saw on the front bezel. The USB ports use a keyed, ten-connector plug, which has become somewhat of a standard among USB port connectors. Firewire, however has no such standard, so instead you get a bunch of (labeled) single-pin connectors, and it’s up to you to match them to the correct pins on the Firewire header on your motherboard. Ditto for the microphone and headphone connectors.

This arrangement, of course, assumes you have the proper headers on your motherboard to utilize these connectors. Obviously, if your motherboard doesn’t come with a Firewire header, or if you’re using a sound card that doesn’t have headers for the microphone and headphone signals, you’ll be unable to use these ports on the P160.

These are the thermistors for the temperature display on the top of the front bezel. There are two of them, and system builders can mount them wherever they choose inside the case. In operation, the display cycles between the values produced by two thermistors, with a small LED indicating which one’s temperature is being displayed. A microswitch inside the case toggles between Celsius and Fahrenheit, and power for the temperature sensors comes from a Molex connector (with pass-through) attached to the inside of the top cover.

Here’s a close-up of one of the internal 3.5″ drive trays. The drive trays can be removed by squeezing in on the spring-loaded clips and pulling straight out. Note the rubber grommets on the bottom of the tray. Special screws included with the P160 come up through these grommets and screw into mounting holes on the bottom of the hard drives. The grommets isolate the drive, keeping its vibrations from being transmitted to the rest of the case.

Directly to the right of the drive trays is a thumbscrew that holds the front fan mount in place. Like the mount on the rear, this one fits a 120mm fan. Only one fan is included with the P160, however, so if you want to mount one here you’ll have to purchase it separately. The fan mount slides into place directly behind the front bezel’s air filter.

 
The case comes with plastic drive rails for mounting any 5.25″ devices. Depending on the type of device, you’ll use one of two sets of holes in the rail. One will mount the device flush with the front bezel, while the other will mount it back slightly. The latter mounting option works with the special optical drive covers that occupy the P160’s top two 5.25″ bays.

One complaint here: The drive rails came loose in a box with the rest of the motherboard standoffs, screws, etc. In the past, Antec has done a better job of keeping the rails with the case so one doesn’t misplace them. Given the P160’s trick optical drive bay covers, I don’t really expect rail storage inside the drive bay covers like the Sonata, but would it have been too much trouble to store them in the bottom of the case ala the SX-1030?

I suppose storing the rails on the bottom of the case would clutter things up if you had a case window, but we’re talking about a case that comes standard without a window. If you can handle putting a window in, you can handle removing storage brackets for the drive rails. For that matter, they would probably fit on the other side panel, “behind” the 5.25″ bays. Then they’d be out of sight, out of mind, and if one needed more rails, one could just pull the other panel to get to them.

The P160 counts a removable motherboard tray as one of its many features. This isn’t exactly the best photo I’ve ever taken, but it hits the highlights at least. In the upper right corner, you can see the track on which the motherboard slides in and out of place. Midway down is the thumbscrew that holds the tray retainer in place. Once the retainer is removed, the tray slides back and out. Directly above the retainer is a handle to aid removal of the tray. Look at the next picture for a better view of it.

Here’s a shot of the tray outside the case. The handle and the frame for the I/O shield make good grabbing points when pulling the tray out.

Here’s a nice touch. The rails on which the motherboard tray rests have soft plastic inserts in them. The inserts are slightly higher than the surrounding metal, which ensures that no vibrations from, say, a CPU fan are transmitted to the rest of the case.

In his Antec Sonata review, Damage lamented the lack of thumbscrews for the PCI and AGP slots. Then, Antec releases the P160, which comes with… thumbscrews for the PCI and AGP slots. Coincidence? You be the judge. Note also that the P160 uses spring-loaded slot covers, rather than blank covers held on by the screws.

In another noise-reducing move, the 120mm fan that mounts in the P160’s rear fan port uses rubbery grommets to hold it in place rather than screws. Again, the idea is to isolate the fan’s vibration and keep it from spreading to the rest of the case.

 
Looking straight into the case after removing the cover, this unassuming-looking little rod pokes out from the lower right corner. It may not look like much, but it’s actually an ingenious lock for the front bezel. The rod is spring-loaded, and when the side panel is replaced, it pushes the rod through a hasp on the bottom of the front bezel. The end result is that the bezel can’t be removed without first pulling the side panel. Pretty slick.

Assuming the side panel is off, removing the bezel is basically a grab-it-and-pull operation. As removable front bezels go, I’ve dealt with much, much worse.

After the front bezel comes off, it’s still attached by the power connector for the blue LEDs. Thoughtfully, Antec put a small plug on both the bezel side and the interior side, making it easy to remove the bezel completely. It seems like an obvious feature, but I’ve dealt with more than one case where LEDs mounted in the front bezel were hardwired, meaning even after removing it, the bezel was basically tied to the front of the case.

Directly above the front fan port is the tray for the 3.5″ drives. The tray is held in place by a couple of thumbscrews. Unscrew them, and the tray slides right out…

Here’s a shot of the tray pulled partway out. Notice the screws on the sides of the tray. Like a Shuttle cube, the drive covers screw into place. This is vastly preferable to “snap-in” bay covers, which tend to snap out of place if accidentally bumped.

Here’s the hasp of the bezel lock I talked about earlier. You can see it’s at the very bottom of the bezel, below the air filter. Speaking of which, let’s take a closer look.

Here’s a shot of the filter installed in the bezel. Installing and removing it is a simple snap in, snap out affair. Look closely at the bottom, and you can see the outlines of the three air intake holes.

This is a close-up of the inside of one of the optical drive covers. Midway down on the left you can see the hinge for the drive door, which swings down when the drive tray slides out, then snaps back into position when the tray closes.

The two beige pieces on the bottom are attached to the silver buttons on the drive cover. These bits of plastic actually contact the optical drive’s buttons. They slide back and forth on notched tracks, allowing the user to adjust them to match the button positions on a particular drive. To the right of these, you can see a small clear window. This window extends most of the way across the drive cover, allowing drive LEDs to show through so long as their position places them within the window. I looked at a variety of optical drives in preparation for this article, and all of them were “P160-friendly” in terms of their LED placement.

 
Putting it all together
Obviously Antec has put a lot of thought into the P160’s feature set, but the best way to evaluate a case is to build a system inside it. In order to really check out the P160, I took the components out of my regular case (the Antec SX-1030) and put them into the P160.

Additionally, this exercise gave me the opportunity to compare the P160 to a case that wasn’t necessarily designed with low noise as a priority. Since the same components were used in both enclosures (except for the power supply) the noise measurements from each case should give you an idea of what kind of improvements to expect if you move your system from a more traditional case to the P160.

The manual for the P160 is about 40 pages long, but it also covers five languages, so the English section, for example, is only eight pages. Nonetheless, the manual provides fairly good instructions on assembling a system inside the case, though I ran into several instances where the design of the case had changed since the manual was printed. Antec even addresses this possibility in the manual: “[I]t’s possible that your new P160 case may differ slightly from the descriptions in this manual. This isn’t a problem; it’s simply an improvement.”

The installation went about as quickly as it typically does in a situation like this. Plugging the seven individual audio pins onto the motherboard header was a bit of a pain, but the removable motherboard tray made it easier to deal with. Without doing anything special to correct it, the P160 seemed to have less clutter inside that some other enclosures. I attribute this fact, at least partially, to the hard drive trays. Their orientation helps keep parallel IDE cables away from the motherboard area.

Once everything was assembled, it was time to power it up and look at some of the more illuminating features of the P160.

We’ll start with the temperature display. Look to the right of the numbers, and you’ll see that the top of two LEDs is currently lit, indicating that the first thermistor is being read. The display cycles between thermistors every three seconds.

Also in the LED department, we have the blue LEDs mounted in the air intake openings. As with the temperature display above, the picture makes the LEDs look brighter than they really are. Because the LEDs are mounted in the top of the openings, the effect isn’t nearly as blinding as the Sonata’s Death Star effect.

Here’s the P160’s optical drive cover in operation. The door is tall enough that it should work with just about any tray-loading optical drive.

The sound of silence
We’ll close out with a graph of the noise levels of the P160 compared with the SX-1030. A few quick notes: The P160 used only the standard rear fan, while the SX-1030 used two 80mm rear fans but no fans up front. With the exception of the power supply, the same set of components was used in both configurations, so these results should be pretty representative of the improvement one might get from switching to the P160 from an older case. Also, remember that these readings are in decibels, which is a logarithmic scale. A small difference on the graph can be a much bigger difference to one’s ears.

Readings were first taken with the sound level meter centered on the front face of each case, six inches away. Then, a second set of readings was obtained from two feet away at a forty five degree angle from the front left corner of the case.

In both cases, the P160 has significantly lower readings than the SX-1030. The difference is less pronounced with the second test, likely because the measuring position picks up more noise from the power supply in the back of the case.

Subjectively, the difference isn’t even close. Even when stuck under my desk with a pull-out keyboard tray between it and my ears, the SX-1030 has a constant loud droning when it’s turned on. Put in the same position under my desk, the P160 was so quiet that, even with the keyboard drawer pushed in and my head bowed down to listen to it, my attention was instead drawn to another machine running a few feet away. Antec’s work to create a quiet case has definitely paid off.

 
Conclusions
Coming from the world of steel beige boxes, I have to admit I had a little bit of sticker shock when I first saw the price of the P160. But let’s face it, comparing the P160 and a boring beige box on price is just silly. In the realm of aluminum cases, the P160 is reasonably priced for an enclosure of its size.

Of course, that statement doesn’t really take into account everything that makes the P160 an Antec. The clever noise reduction features, the cleanly integrated temperature sensors, the versatile drive bay covers—these are things you don’t find in many enclosures. The P160 benefits from Antec’s typical fit and finish, as well; the various pieces fit together as snugly as a set of Lego blocks.

If you’re a case modder, the P160 will provide a great base on which to build a looker of a system. If you just want an enclosure that’s unusual but still somewhat understated in its design, the P160 will fit the bill there, too. The price of entry may be higher than you’re used to, but for what it is, the P160 is worth every penny.  

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