Antec 1900 Gaming Case Review

Up Close:  Interior Overview, Drive bays Rear and Roof

Releasing rubber coated thumb bolts at the rear enables the side panels to be popped off.  Inside there’s…actually inside it’s basically an Antec P280, in fact not even basically, the inside of the main section is absolutely identical to the inside of a P280, nice to know that in releasing a fresh design Antec have just welded the chassis of a P280 to a small base extension.  Anyways plenty of space, as you would expect with a case that offers this level of Motherboard support.  All the major cable management holes are rubber grommeted, with a hole in the floor of the chassis making it possible to transit cables between the two sections of the case.  Be careful if you use this though as beside this floor mounted grommet there are four very sharp screw threads protruding in from the underside.  Nice touch Antec, how about you add some swabs and sticky plasters to the accessories!

     

 

The three 5.25″ drive bays are toolfree but with screw holes should you wish to clamp things down that little bit more.

     

 

Below the 5.25″ bays a single rack supporting six 3.5″ drives can be found.  The upper most section of this is bracketed in so as to provide storage for 2.5″ drives.  By any stretch of this imagination this is an ugly solution, 2.5″ SSDs drives have been around long enough now for case manufacturers to have thought of and designed more elegant solutions than this for housing them.  It’s also a crying shame that the entire drive bay assembly is one piece and is riveted in place, meaning any aspirations of front mounted rads will require a dremel and commitment to help them be realised.  With the six bay rack measuring 300mm in height had it been removable there would have been plenty of room to fit a thick 240mm rad in there.  Add the 5.25″ bays into the mix and you would have been looking at a total of 450mm of usable rad space which is plenty enough for even the longest 360s on the market.  Had they thought on still further and formed a cut out in the floor allowing rads to pass down through into the lower section you’d then be looking at 570mm of space 480s anyone?  All of which means Antec have missed quite a spectacular opportunity.

     

 

Things don’t improve too much when we turn our attention to the base of the case.  We’ve already mentioned the sharp screw heads protruding up from underneath, and the cable routing hole, which if you should use it will of course have a great knot of cables clearly visible frontside through the case window.  The upper most of the PSU areas can also be found here with a solitary thick rubber vibration support standing lonely and abandoned amongst the metal supports (what’s the point of a single rubber damper?)  At least you get a hefty 9 expansion bays finished in a contrasting Nvidia/AMD scheme.

       

 

Holy crap, what a mess!  We know a lot of cases are built overseas, but we thought the laws on child labour wouldn’t have permitted Antec to employ what appears to have been a 3 year old to wire in the fans.  The bad news doesn’t end there though as you’ll notice from the image below right the Nineteen Hundred has two 120mm fans fitted into a bracket so the largest rad you’re going to get up here is a 240, and most likely an AIO.  Why an AIO?  because if you’re into custom loop water-cooling you won’t be buying this case.  Again all this is a crying shame as there’s 450mm of usable space up here, and with the motherboard set some 55mm off the ceiling medium thickness 360 rads would have and should have been on the cards.