Antec Twelve Hundred

Author: Rhys "Apollo"
Published: Jul 15th, 2008
Category: Cases, Reviews

Antec Twelve Hundred Case Review

Introduction

Antec have surprised us in the past with their very stylish cases. Today, we’ll be reviewing something slightly different from the normal high class cases Antec have sent us. Today we’ll be reviewing is the Antec Twelve Hundred, otherwise known as the 1200 – the big brother of the highly successful Nine Hundred. This case – like its brother – is designed towards gamers with the masses of space it offers and its cooling potential. However, is it good enough to live up with its brother? Read on to find out…

About Antec

Antec, Inc., is the leading global brand of high-performance computer components and accessories for the gaming, PC upgrade and Do-It-Yourself (DIY) markets. Founded in 1986, Antec is recognized as a pioneer in these industries and has maintained its position as a worldwide market leader and international provider of efficient, quiet, and reliable products.

Features

12 Drive Bays
Perforated front bezel for maximum air intake
Washable air filters reduce dust build up in your system
Advanced Cooling System:
• 1 top special 200 x 30 mm blue LED exhaust fan with 3-speed switch control (LEDs can be switched off as well)

• 2 rear 120 x 25 mm special blue LED exhaust fans with 3-speed switch control

• 3 front 120 x 25 mm special blue LED intake fans with front speed control

• 1 side 120 x 25 mm fan to cool graphic cards (optional)

• 1 middle 120mm fan to cool CPU or graphic cards (optional)

• Water cooling platform for reservoir or pump
7 expansion slots
Top mounted I/O ports for easy access
• Power and reset button with blue LED

• 2 x USB 2.0

• 1 x eSATA

• HD Audio In and Out
Convenient top accessory tray for a personal media player
Motherboard: Up to standard ATX
No Power Supply included: To optimize performance of your Twelve Hundred, your choice of power supply is crucial. Antec strongly recommends choosing from our NeoPower or TruePower series.
Dimensions:
• 22.9″ (H) x 8.4″ (W) x 20.2″ (D)

• 58.2 (H) x 21.3 (W) x 51.3 (D) cm

The Package

The Antec 1200 arrives in a fairly large cardboard box with an eye catching image on the front of the twelve hundred looking fairly sinister.

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The back of the box has three images of the Antec: front, back and side. Beneath the images are the specifications bullet pointed in three different languages: English, French and German.

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The sides of the box have more features and info about the Twelve Hundred – mostly of which has been repeated in other areas on the box.

This box is very informative which is great for the buyer as it has everything which you’d need to know before making a purchase.

Inside the box, the case is protected fairly well with thick pieces of Styrofoam and is wrapped in a polythene bag. This protects it from any knocks and bumps during the rough shipping process. It’s nice to see Antec using Styrofoam, as polystyrene – which use to be used - is the most annoying packaging material as it often makes a lot of mess.

Inside the box, you’ll find:

The Antec Twelve Hundred (1200)
A box full of accessories
Manual and Warrantee leaflet

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This is what you’d normally expect to have been included with a case like this.

However, the box of accessories is a little larger than other ones I’ve had with cases in the past. This indicates that there are possibly more accessories.

Opening the accessories box up you’ll find:

A bag full of an assortment of screws
4 cable tidy’s
A 3 ½” bay converter and bracket

With some Antec cases they don’t include a bay converter, but as this case has no visible 3 ½“drives, it makes sense why they’ve included one.

Antec’s Twelve Hundred (1200)

On the outside…

The case is completely black in colour and features a large window on the left side-panel allowing you to show-off all your tech porn. The paint job on the case doesn’t look as high quality to other cases from Antec i.e. the Antec Sonata 550 Plus. The paint job on the Twelve Hundred seems to have more of an ‘orange peel’ effect compared with the Sonata which is a glossy flat finish.

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The whole case is constructed from a mixture of both Steel and Plastic. This seems to be the obvious choice for materials in this category as Aluminium seems to be more targeted to higher end cases – which often come with higher prices. None-the-less, steel is still the most popular choice of material for computer cases due to its obvious characteristics i.e. Price.

The left side-panel of the case features a large acrylic window which sits flush into the panel. Altogether there are 13 screws securing the window to the side-panel, so it’s nice and rigid. Windows on cases seem to have faded out in the computer industry in recent years, but at heart, we all still love to show-off the flashy lights which inhabit our tech porn. To the left of the window, part of the side panel is perforated and a 120mm fan rests in the middle. Oddly though, this perforated part is backed with acrylic. Therefore, it adds no performance gain in cooling from the perforation – simply aesthetics only.

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Moving towards the front of the case we can see twelve visible 5.25” drive bays which again, are perforated in a ‘honey comb’ style. Oddly enough, the second and third drive bays from the top seem to have some sort of sound dampening backing. This indicates that these bays could be for silencing a hard drive, perhaps? On three of the drive bays, there seems to be dials, a good prediction would be that these dials are perhaps fan controllers - a nice feature for anyone wanting ultimate control of their fans. Surrounding the drive bays, is thick matt-black plastic. This seems to represent a ‘pillar’ kind of style at the front – giving it that ultimate gamer look.

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As far as switches and ports go, unlike most cases where they’d be located at the middle of the case; the Twelve Hundred’s are all located at the top – sitting beside each other. From left to right we have:

Reset Switch
Two USB 2.0 Ports
eSATA port (for blazingly fast transfer speeds with external hard drives)
Microphone Jack
Headphone Jack
Power Switch

This is all the ports we could ask for. Providing an eSATA port is a great bonus, as external eSATA drives are becoming increasingly popular.

Beneath all these switches and ports is the Antec logo – engraved in a metal badge.

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Rearing to the other side panel, it’s fairly boring. It’s just a solid matt black colour which shows Antec haven’t even had an attempt at making it aesthetically pleasing. A lot of cases are now beginning to style both side panels and as people nowadays tend to position their PC’s differently, it would’ve been nice for even a logo – that would’ve finished it off.

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At the back panel of the case – where everything gets plugged in – it’s a little unique to other cases we’ve tested. Firstly, the back panel is black; this indicates that the chassis is also going to be black, which personally, is a much nicer look than the retro dull grey we tend to see on chassis’s. Furthermore, there are dual 120mm fans situated in the top-right of the case; most cases come with just one 120mm fan – so the extraction of hot air from this case should be good. This reinforces my point on this case being designed towards the Overclocker or Gamer, as cooling for them is a very important factor of their case decision. To the left of the top 120mm fan are three 3-way switches and a single on/of switch. These are for controlling the speeds of yet more fans inside the chassis and turning on/off the led’s on the top fan. Jeezus…how many fans? Below this is the norm: IO shield and PCI slots. However, to the side of the PCI blanking plates are two rubber circular ‘plugs’. For water cooling enthusiasts this is a great advantage as they allow you to easily route water cooling tubes through. Sitting right at the bottom of the case is a placement for a PSU, again, this is a slightly odd placement, but is becoming more common in newer case due to the increased cooling ability and cable management.

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Going birds-eye, the top of the case features a large 200m fan edging to the rear of the case and a large storage space at the front which can be used for storing pen drives, mp3 players… you get the idea. Just like the front panel, the top is made from thick plastic- although the perforated fan grill which stops fingers from being sliced is steel. To add strength and rigidness, it seems the plastic top of the case is screwed to a metal base. Overall, I’m surprised Antec have managed to fit a 200mm fan on the top as it seems like a very close fit. This will of course, give a lot of airflow to the case, but could impact dramatically on noise with such a large fan which isn’t concealed very well.

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On the bottom of the case, there are four rubber feet. Unlike el-cheapo cases where the feet are solid plastic, these rubber ones should help to reduce noise. However, the rubber seems to be quite hard, so the case needs some good serious weight added to it before the feet start working properly in sound dampening. Aside from sound dampening, with the gridded pattern on the feet, the feet provide plenty of friction, hence grip.

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Moving in…

Making your way into the case is very simple, just remove the two black thumb screws on the rear and then the panel can be slid off easily. Immediately after removing the panel, the first part which stands out is the solid black chassis. This adds to the sinister look of the case and aesthetically, it looks a lot better than the dull grey found in most cases.

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Flipping the side panel round, we can take a closer look at its construction. It appears, the acrylic side panel is screwed onto the inside of the panel, but the acrylic sits on the outside. This method of installation isn’t as strong as if the window was installed on the inside, but adds to the aesthetics… and aesthetics… we like. The acrylic which backs the perforated holes however, it mounted on the inside (with screws). Mounted in the middle of the acrylic is a 120mm dust filter. Fortunately, this dust filter can be removed simply by sliding it out. If you were to install a fan over this dust filter - most I would assume – the fan simply gets held in place by two clips which ‘latch’ onto the fan.

The first feature on the internals is the small rubber pieces which sit on the bottom panel where the PSU would be mounted. These act as a pedestal for the power supply and help to reduce vibrations from the unit throughout the Twelve Hundred. If you didn’t notice from the back of the case, when a PSU is mounted in the case, it can be mounted upside-down or upright. This means that the fan - if you have one – on your PSU can be facing upwards in the case and not at the floor of the Antec.

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Another obvious feature is the long tower format drive bays at the front. Altogether there are a total of 12 drive bays; however, nine of them are taken up with three drive bays which can each accommodate three hard drives or 3 ½” drives. These drive cages are secured with eight thumbscrews (four on each side of the drive bays) for easy tool-less removal. When unscrewed, to remove the cages, they slot out of the front of the case smoothly and effortlessly- with their perforated drive-bay banking plates attached (by screws). Taking a look at each drive cage reveals a 120mm fan and filter which is mounted at the front of each drive bay – keeping your hard disks nice and cool – but dust free. Furthermore, the top drive cage comes with a mount allowing you to install a 120mm fan at both ends of the drive cage for ultimate hard disk cooling.

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Another nice feature of the Antec is the motherboard plate. As the case is quite large, there is plenty of space around the motherboard plate for large graphics cards, easy installation and upgrading of components. For cable management, there are many holes in the motherboard plate which are useful for routing cables. All these holes seem to be in good positions for components - this shows some good thinking from Antec. At the rear of the motherboard plate, there are many cable tidies making securing cables effortless without having to use lots of zip ties and sticky pads.

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Unfortunately every single fan inside the Antec just has a Molex connection; this makes it extremely annoying for people wanting to ditch Molex completely for just SATA connections – like myself. This could also be a bit of a pain in terms of cable management – it’s often a lot tidier if you can power fans from 3-pin connections on your motherboard. However, as all the fans are connected to a fan controller, it would seem pointless using a 3-pin connection, but it is, a lot tidier and could’ve easily been done as an extra.

Installation

The system we installed in the Antec 1200 is as follows:

Processor	Intel C2D E8400 @ 3.6GHz
Memory	Corsair XMS2 6400 (2x 1GB)
Motherboard	Asus P5K Premium
Graphics Card	Vivikoo 9600GT
Power Supply	Antec NeoPower 550W
Hard Drive	Western Digital SATA SE16 500GB
Optical Drive	Samsung SATA DVD-RW

The first part of the installation was the motherboard, as the standoffs for an ATX motherboard are pre-installed; all the installation involved was popping in our ASUS IO plate and screwing the motherboard in place.

Installing the RAM modules and processor was very easy as the Twelve Hundred has plenty of room to work with when installing components in this case. The same goes for our ‘Asus Triton 79 Amazing’ CPU Cooler - a CPU cooler which is normally a bit awkward to install - but was in fact very easy due to having lots of room to play with.

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Now that the motherboard bundle was installed, I slotted the graphics card into place. As there are no thumbscrews supplied for PCI cards in the Twelve Hundred, its back out with the old fashioned screws, however this method of installation is perhaps more robust than newer methods – although being slightly slower.

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Installing by massive Kingwin Power Supply was easy enough – four screws securing it in place. The PSU mount allows you to install the PSU either upside down or upright – depending on your power supplies’ fan location.

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Once that was in, I removed the bottom hard drive cage and slotted in my Western Digital hard drive and secured it in place with the included mega long hard disk screws. The screws holes are lined with rubber – which also sits between the hard disk and cage – allowing no vibrations from the disk to make their way around the case – dampening out noise. After securing the hard drive in its cage, I slotted the cage back into the 3 drive bays and secured it using the eight thumbscrews.

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Installing my Samsung DVD-RW was a very familiar process- four screws. This method is both proven to be simple and effective so Antec have made the right choice of using it.

After installing all the tech porn, I plugged everything up inside the Twelve Hundred and had a go at cable management inside the case. Fortunately with the various holes in the motherboard tray and the space between the tray and side panel, I could also easily route cables about the case. With this in mind, the Antec Twelve Hundred is a perfect candidate for cable good cable management.

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Testing

At Tech-Reviews we test cases for a number of different factors: Strength, Noise and Temperatures.

The way in which we test strength is fairly simple. We stand on the top of the case and jump up and down on it – this is quite a fun test and can really show the effectiveness of the construction. A case which is strong should not be damaged from this test at all; whereas a weak case would bend and buckle.

Testing noise is quite difficult as expensive sound equipment is needed which unfortunately, we don’t have access to. Instead, we use out own God given human ears to give you an ‘as accurate as we can get’ explanation on the case’s noise with a comparative conclusion of its noise.

Temperatures are recorded using a mixture of programs. To measure CPU temperature, we take 3 temperature readings at 10 second intervals and then record an average temperature. This test is done with the CPU at both idle and load state. Recordings are measured using the CPU’s own diode and SpeedFan.

The next component to test the temperature of is the chipset. This is measured using SiSoftware Sandra and just like the CPU, is tested at idle and load states with the final recording being the average of 3 temperatures.

The Hard Drive temperature is measured using HD Tune in the same way as the rest of the components.

To record the systems temperature we use a digital thermometer to firstly calculate the environments ambient temperature at the time of the tests and then we measure the systems temperature when at idle and load states. Averages don’t need to be done for this as the temperatures often stay at a fixed point; however we take averages just like the other tests to make the test fair.

Results

The strength test went well with no bending of the construction or any weaknesses being made obvious. We stomped on the top fan grill of the case – which showed no sign of any weaknesses. This is great news to hear for any active LAN gamer who’s regularly transporting their rig about.

Setting all fans to high speed, the case is horrendously loud. However, when setting the fans to low speed, I got a bit of a shock – the fans drop in noise enormously and the annoying sound becomes a slight whirring. This is perfect for any gamer – as the noise from gun shots and bombs would easily block out this noise.

All the temperature recordings below were calculated with every fan set to low as this is probably the most common fan setting users will likely use on this case.

Antec Twelve Hundred Case Review

The ambient temperature which the case was tested in was 23 degrees Celsius.

The hard drive temperatures prove that the front 120mm fans which are seated in hard drive cages are doing a good job of cooling the disks as the temperatures at both idle and load are very low and don’t differ much.

The idle temperature of this CPU is very good with it at 34 degrees and as this is an overclocked e8400 –we expected to have much higher temperatures. Even at full load the temperatures are great with it at 45 degrees. Normally we’d expect the load temperature to averaging somewhere in the 50 region.

By far, the ambient case temperatures are very impressive with the idle temperature being just 1 degree more than the testing environments ambient temperature. At load, we see this increase by 2 degrees – a minor increase.

The chipset, just like the other temperatures is very impressive. At idle we see it peaking at 34 degrees whilst at load it reaches 43 degrees – a 9 degree increase. This is a little lower than the normal temperature you’d expect to see and as this system is overclocked, the chipset would normally be a bit hotter than average. In that sense, the temperature is bang on.

Conclusion

From this whole review I have a valid conclusion. This case is definitely designed for gaming and overclocking in mind. That is, because it offers great performance due to the great cooling system this case entails and the ease of installation due to the amount of space around key components.

Aside from performance, its aesthetics are also appealing – that is, if you’re a gamer. If you’re after great quality i.e. a solid construction, shiny panels etc. Then you may have to look elsewhere as the Antec’s paint job is somewhat poor as it has an ‘orange peel’ paint effect and quality wise, with a plastic front panel and top – it’s somewhat tacky.

However don’t be put off by this, as I’m sure most will love the look of this case. It’s a perfect candidate for a gamer who’s looking for style and performance.

So does it fit the budget? With it retailing at £115, I’d say no as for that, you can buy an aluminium case – which would offer even better performance and quality. But for the ease of installation and full-on gamer look this case creates, it’s definitely the case that will get some attention at any LAN party.

4 Star Award