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Antec Three Hundred
Cooling
The Antec 300 is fitted by default with two case fans, one in the top and one in the rear. Underneath the mesh cover for the front of the case, there are two more fan mounts for you to use. Lets take a look at the front of the case underneath the mesh cover.
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The front mesh cover swings away from the front and exposes the cdrom bays as well as the two fan bays. The fans are secured in two ways: The fan itself screws into the fan door, and the fan door is then secured to the front of the case by two thumb screws. The positioning of the front fans is extremely nice. The fan doors provide easy access to your hard disks as well as more than adequate cooling. The bottom pictures shows the Antec 300 with three hard drives and the two optional fans installed. The top fan is a 140mm, high flow case fan that is extremely quiet. Personally, I dislike a lot of noise in my room when I am trying to sleep, and the quietness of this case design was a welcome addition. It seems to me that the design of the front of the case was meant to reduce the noise from the hard disks as well as the fans. In my opinion, it seems to be quite good at doing it.
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I have one gripe with the fans that come with this case... the fan speeds are adjustable using a small black wire that you can see in the fourth picture following the power cable back into the case, however, there are no holes in the case to allow external access to these controllers. Basically, you have this great ability to customize the speed settings of your fans, but the case design requires you to open the case to do so. Providing extensive built-in cooling is a welcome move by Antec but I hope that in the next iteration of their cases they include a feature that allows external access to the fan speed controls.
This case is designed around optimal airflow and extreme quiet computing. The use of large fans as well as a perforated mesh for the front of the case allows air into the case for maximum cooling, yet it keeps sound inside of the case to keep your computing experience quiet and pleasurable. So far so good.. Lets look at the cable management systems...
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