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

For testing today we are using an AMD Phenom 1055T based system.

Antec Dark Fleet DF 85 Full Tower Case

KitGuru AMD reference gaming system:
Processor: AMD Phenom 1055T
Cooler: Noctua NH C12P SE14 Cooler review
Motherboard: MSI 890 GXM-G65
Graphics: eVGA GTX460 Superclocked
PSU: Coolermaster 700w
Hard Drive: Intel 80GB SSD
Memory: Kingston 8GB DDR3 1600mhz

Windows 7 Ultimate Edition 64bit

Thermal Diodes
Raytek Laser Temp Gun 3i LSRC/MT4 Mini Temp
Digital Sound Level Noise Decibel Meter Style 2

Firstly let us have a look at the chassis design and airflow, as it comes ‘out of the box’.

At the front we have three 120mm fans which are set to intake positions. This forces cool air in from the front, over the motherboard, this air is then sucked upwards by the two 120mm and two 140mm fans at the rear and top of the case. This is pretty much a traditional cooling methodology which works well.

We have placed thermal diodes in 5 case positions – 1; top optical drive bay position. 2; hard drive position. 3; top area between CPU and fan exhaust positions. 4; above PSU, graphics card (s) area. 5; motherboard central ‘dead zone’ area.

We test with our AMD 1055T at reference clock speeds and voltages. Nothing else is overclocked. Room Ambient temperatures in our labs are maintained at a constant 25c with air conditioning. There is no side panel case fan installed (although the door is closed to mimic a real world situation). Load is measured by running Cinebench R11.5 in a loop with Furmark, worst temperatures are recorded through a duration of 20 minutes.

All case fans were set to their lowest possible settings to keep noise to a minimum (more on this later).

The case is keeping all the ambient temperatures basically at room temperature which is a great set of results. Due to the excellent air flow we can note that temperatures under load around the diodes didn't increase at all.

We then installed a 120mm Noctua fan into the side window with the supplied kit included in the Antec bundle.

Adding the extra fan helped the GTX 460 SC temperatures drop by 3c under load. It also dropped the diode 4 temp by 1c … to room temperature.

Next we cranked the system speeds, increasing core voltage on the 1055T and overclocking it to 4ghz. We left the Noctua side fan installed and enabled.

The Antec Dark Fleet DF-85 is clearly one of the best cooling cases we have tested as these are class leading performance figures. in the same category as the Silverstone Raven 02.

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