Antec Dark Fleet DF 85 Full Tower Case Review

1. Introduction2. Antec Dark Fleet DF 85 Exterior3. Antec Dark Fleet DF 85 Internal and Installation4. Testing Methodology and Performance Results5. Acoustics Testing6. Closing Thoughts7. View All Pages

To open the case, there are a total of four thumbscrews, two on each side panel. You don't need a screwdriver to open this case, which earns it a bonus point already.

The insides are painted black, something that is becoming standardised and we are glad to see it. At the bottom of the chassis there are four rubber risers which are home to the PSU, this also has the added benefit of allowing air to circulate under it. At the front there is a unit for mounting hard drives and at the bottom there is an ‘SSD' slot for mounting a 2.5 inch drive.

Fitting a drive is simple, slide it in and then attach your sata and power cables to the little unit attached to the mounting bar – Antec call this the Fleet Swap drive system (after using it for a week, we can safely say, we love it). There is a lot of room inside this chassis, for up to nine drives. Above this there is room for three 5.25 inch drives. These use a traditional locking system and I am personally glad to see Antec ditching the fiddly rail system they used on the last chassis I looked at a year ago.

We have to mention that the build quality of this case really is of a very high standard throughout. Everything fits perfectly together which is clearly the sign of high quality engineering. The rear is home to two 120mm fans which are speed controllable from the outside (detailed on the last page).

At the top are the two 140mm TwinCool fans, these are not LED units, but they are speed controllable from the same exterior panel as the rear units.

Removing the other side panel we can see they have a cut position for easy access to a rear mounted backplate. There is also plenty of area and room for effective cable routing.

Being such a spacious case the installation procedure is as easy as it gets. There is a lot of room around the top of the case which makes fitting oversized CPU coolers painfree. We installed an Intel SSD drive into a standard drive slot and it took literally 20 seconds.

On the other side of the chassis we have all the fan based molex connectors daisy chained. Thankfully there are plenty of cut positions to hide these from view.

Above is our AMD reference gaming system, which features an eVGA GTX460 Superclocked graphics card and an AMD 1055T processor. Installation really was a pleasure, with ample room on all sides to work without restriction.

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