Antec Skeleton
Posted 02/03/09 at 10:00:00 AM by Nathan Edwards
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We have to give Antec points for bucking the mainstream: The Skeleton is a seriously cool-looking case. The motherboard rests horizontally, so the case’s footprint is much wider than that of a standard tower chassis, but it’s also shorter. The open design and sliding component tray make it easy to swap parts in and out, and installation is quick and relatively painless. The Super Big Boy LED fan, which truly is both super and big, dominates the top of the case, keeping air moving over all your components, and the open design ensures that there’s plenty of airflow. A smaller fan mounts in front of the hard drive bay for additional cooling.
Removing two spring-loaded thumbscrews lets you slide out the component tray about three quarters of the way, providing easy access to the motherboard as well as the optical and hard drives. The side panels remove easily, and there’s a sliding bay for the power supply. But screwless this case ain’t. Your Phillips head screwdriver will be a constant companion.
The open design offers no protection against liquids, pets, children, or Chex Mix. The squat proportions also work against it—there are only two 5.25-inch and two 3.5-inch bays under the motherboard, so any additional hard drives need to be mounted outside of the case, for which Antec provides four brackets. And given the open-frame design, there aren’t many solutions for elegant cable routing. We had to do some finessing to connect all our parts.
Depending on your motherboard’s layout, you may have issues with the front-panel connectors; the HD Audio ports are in the rear of our EVGA 680i board, and the Skeleton’s front-panel audio wires barely reached them. And watch out for your CPU cooler—anything more than about four inches tall will bump up against the fan cowl and prevent you from moving the tray in and out, so avoid any of the monstrously huge coolers that are so popular these days. Stock fans will work fine, and fortunately, so will our current favorite cooler, the Thermaltake DuOrb. Due to the space constraints, any water-cooling setup will have to use an external reservoir—since the Skeleton has only two 5.25-inch bays, it’s impossible to mount one internally.
Still, we love the design and portability of the Skeleton. It’s especially useful for testers and other people who, like us, swap hardware frequently. If you have plenty of desk space and don’t need to worry about errant liquids or hairballs, the Skeleton could be the bold, new case you’ve been looking for.
Antec Skeleton
Manny Calavera
Innovative design, easy and intuitive installation. Big, beautiful fan. Good test bench.
Skeleton Crew
Strangely cramped for such an open design. Not good for the clumsy.
<CITE>there are only two
Submitted by Biggins on Wed, 02/11/2009 - 7:30pm
<CITE>there are only two 5.25-inch
and two 3.5-inch bays <BR>
any water-cooling setup will have to
use an external reservoir</CITE>It's called the Skeleton, not the "Super-deluxe-cram-all-your-hard-drives-and-water-cooling-stuff-in-here."
If you need 9 drive bays, get the P182, Twelve Hundred, or Cosmos. The Skeleton
is NOT for people who need 3 GTX 280's, a 1500 watt PSU, 2 Blu-ray drives,
2 Velociraptors, and 4 TB of mass storage.If you only use one video card, one
hard drive, a small/medium size CPU cooler, and a 500 watt PSU, then you should consider buying
the Skeleton. Unless you have small children or don't have enough sense
to use compressed air to clean out your computer.It's a good thing Max PC doesn't review
cars. You might read something like this: "The Prius loses points
for being too small to haul lumber, the engine is too weak to tow a camper
up a steep incline and it won't fit 5 people that weigh more than 300 pounds
each."
This looks great
Submitted by cfmwarren on Wed, 02/04/2009 - 5:16pm
i will probly be using for next build.
Ive always wanted a case that realy shows what you have inside. Case windows are so restrictive and this case is so futuristic. Good idea Antec!
Submitted by majorsuave on Wed, 02/04/2009 - 10:27am
One thing that a good PC case that's made of steel provides is electromagnetic shielding. The amazing amount of radio waves, electronic interferences or other cosmic rays reaching one's PC is amazing. Leaving all those parts up in the air is silly. Digital sound is especially vulnerable to interferences.
Nay I say.
Sometimes you have to give in to something stupid...
Submitted by overthetopdan on Tue, 02/03/2009 - 4:40pm
I'll be the first one to agree that this is a really bad idea for an every day use kind of pc...but, lets face it...The only way better to show off your GPU's than a case like this is to take em out and put em on the counter.
Who cares about what the GPU
Submitted by Keith E. Whisman on Tue, 02/03/2009 - 9:14pm
Who cares about what the GPU looks like you can wow them with your 3DMark scores. As I look back the 5800FX looked great too.
Submitted by Keith E. Whisman on Tue, 02/03/2009 - 12:42pm
Just be extra careful to cover your mouth and nose when you sneeze around this thing.
Certainly give kudos to
Submitted by jcollins on Tue, 02/03/2009 - 10:28am
Certainly give kudos to Antec for making a nifty looking concept case. I don't really see it being viable for the majority of people though. Just too big a footprint.
Cool, but...
Submitted by msg on Tue, 02/03/2009 - 7:07am
At first glance the case looks pretty cool.
But then I realized how susceptible it was to stuff, like dust as mentioned below. Probably something you wouldn't want to place on the floor, to avoid accidental kicks to the machine or an electric shock to yourself.
Also, you might be able to watch a capacitor explode :P
Submitted by AndyYankee17 on Tue, 02/03/2009 - 3:56am
this design looks like it would offer sucky cooling, there's no way you can channel air flow all around your parts like in a typically case
nice design
Submitted by Bravo_18 on Tue, 02/03/2009 - 2:19am
One thing i may note, PC harware is supceptible to DUST...
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