Antec P280 Case Review

1. Introduction2. Packaging3. Antec P280 Exterior4. Antec P280 Interior5. Testing Methodology and Performance6. Acoustic performance7. Closing thoughts8. View All Pages

The very spacious interior of the Antec P280 is painted entirely black.  There are six removable drive bays for either SSD drives or standard hard drives. There is a large area cutout of the motherboard tray to provide access to the back of the motherboard.  This large cutout makes it very easy to swap out cooling options when needed.

Our second image shows us the connections that attach to the motherboard. These connections provide power to the essentials such as On/Off, Reset, HD Led, USB 2.0 and 3.0 and HD Audio.

Antec mentioned before publication that people who purchase this case or the new 1100 can get a free adapter that make the two USB 3.0 ports function as USB 2.0 ports. This adapter will make sure users get access to all 4 front USB ports if their motherboard does not offer native USB 3.0 support.

Turning to the opposite side of the chassis we can see there is plenty of space to route cables. Antec have provided 30mm of space for this purpose.

As mentioned earlier, the P280 design allows for a bottom mounted power supply.  There is a removable dust filter that sits beneath the power supply that can be easily removed when it needs to be cleaned.  Due to the size of the Antec P280 you may want to ensure that the cables on your power supply are long enough. We were unable to hide our 8pin connector behind the board because of the short nature of the cable on this particular unit.

The P280 has 6 removable drive trays. Each of them is designed to hold an SSD drive or a standard 3.5 inch hard drive.  The trays have rubber mounts on them to reduce any unwanted vibrations.

The 3 x 5.25″ drive bays are designed to be tool free. It is as simple as pulling the tab to release the locking mechanism, then sliding the drive into the empty space. Finally depressing the tab on the locking mechanism secures the drive in place.

Inside there are three x 120mm fans included. There are two located in the top panel and one located in the rear panel.  All three fans are configured to exhaust air out of the P280. As a member of their Performance One range, it seems an oversight for Antec not to include a single intake fan as a default install option.

The fans are controlled by a small built in fan controller. This unit requires a molex connection to supply power to the fans. This item is poorly placed as it can be difficult to access after other components are installed.

The rear panel of the P280, after the system build is completed. The fan controller allows us to choose either low or high speed operation for each of the three fans that are installed in the factory.

It is worth noting that cable length should be considered when building a system in this chassis.  The power supply we used has relatively short cables which prevented us from hiding the 8pin cable in behind the motherboard tray.  An extender cable could be supplied by Antec to help users who would like to comfortably route the cables behind the motherboard plate.

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