Antec P183 Advanced Super Mid Tower

A look inside
 
Upon opening the case you will find a small cardboard box which contains a collection of drive rails: 4x 5¼” and 1x 3½”, some cable ties and enough screws to build your PC twice over. Also included is a wire fan mount kit which is for attaching a 120mm fan of your choice to the middle drive cage.
 
 
Also present is the user guide. It’s good to see that Antec have updated the guide for the P183, as the previous incarnations were taken from the P180. It’s little attentions to detail like this, that add to the overall user perception of a product. You also receive a pin out guide for the front Audio, USB and eSATA connections, which is useful along with the excellent Antec 3 year warranty. I have to mention Antec have reps present on many forums including our very own. This speaks volumes about their commitment to customer care.
 
Looking over P183’s predecessors, Antec have listened to users feedback and has made changes as required.  As with previous P18x series cases, the chassis is split into a dual chamber design with the PSU and the primary hard drive cage which has space for 4 hard drives (mounted on rubber grommets to improve noise dampening) being located in the lower chamber, while the upper chamber houses the main components; such as your motherboard, CPU, graphics cards and optical drives.  The upper chamber has room for an additional 2 hard drives, 4x 5¼” external drives and 1 external 3½” drive.  The two chambers are separated by a series of cabling channels which, in turn are covered by a movable plastic panel. This is designed to keep any heat produced by your PSU and hard drives away from your main system components. You will also notice the lack of the lower chamber middle fan; this has now been relocated to in front of the hard drive cage, a very welcome change indeed. PSU cable management is now far easier than with the P180 or P182, this change was to help accommodate Antec’s new CPX form factor PSU.
 
 
On the reverse side of the P183, Antec have not needed to make any changes. We still have the cable ties and the pre-cut cable routes, which are a god send. Neat cabling is not such a mission when you have convenient channels to route cables through. There are plenty of opportunities to hide and tie down cables here and other case manufacturers could learn to take a leaf out of Antecs book. Also present is the storage compartment, quite why they put it here is a mystery. If you were to open it while it was still inside the case, the contents would spill out all over, not to mention its a bit of a pain to get to. I feel a far better solution, would have been to use one of the external 5 ¼” drive bays as a draw which could be removed should you need to use the bay. 
 
Lets see what its like to work with.Â