Antec Twelve Hundred
Printou will not find a more powerful air-cooled case on the market than Antec’s Twelve Hundred—not unless you strap a box fan to the side of your chassis. That’s what it would take to challenge the cooling prowess of this full-tower enclosure, which features one 20cm fan on top and five 12cm fans placed throughout the interior. These six blue LED fans are attached to individual switches that allow you to tweak the strength (and sound) of each fan to suit your needs.
While the case’s cooling is top-notch, not all of the Twelve Hundred’s features are so thoughtfully designed. The fans’ cables could stand to be longer to better utilize the case’s numerous holes and attachments for cable management. And while the Twelve Hundred comes with an additional switch to turn the 20cm fan’s light on and off, it would be nice if we could control all the lights at once. And the installation procedure for hard drives is overly complicated. You have to remove a grand total of 16 screws to insert a single drive—what ever happened to no-fuss rails?
The case has plenty of room on the inside—vertically. Larger graphics cards, such as Nvidia’s 8800 GTX, fit inside the chassis but leave little room for stringing cables along the card’s side. We would have preferred a wider case to the unusable space above the motherboard. The chassis supports three 5.25-inch devices and nine 3.5-inch drives, but we’d gladly trade two drive bays for more usable space.
We liked the Antec Nine Hundred, but we expected the Twelve Hundred to improve on its predecessor’s shortcomings—such as the narrow body and overly complex drive installation. Antec has done nothing to fix these issues. We could excuse these things in the Nine Hundred because its exceptional cooling-based design impressed us greatly. We’re now at the design’s second iteration, and the Twelve Hundred offers little above and beyond what we’ve already seen. This isn’t an improvement; it’s a resize.
Antec Twelve Hundred
300
More cooling than a wind tunnel, elegant design, USB and eSATA front-panel connectors.
4400
A tight horizontal fit, drive installations take forever, no screwless mounting.
7
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RUSENSITIVESWEETNESS
November 17, 2011 at 3:06pm
I bought mine years back, attracted to the volume of air it moved. I never considered the amount of space behind the motherboard's back plane. Maximum PC magazine slammed this case in their review. Now I understand why.
A case marketed to gamers should consider the form necessary to hide our cables and show off our hardware. There's not enough room between the motherboard back plane and the side of the case to fit anything beyond fan wiring (you get about 3/8"). Power cables and SATA cables have to remain inside, crowding an already crowded space. I say crowded, because while the case is tall and spacious vertically, it is cramped front to back and side-to-side.
The case puts your power supply at the bottom. You are planning to install a water cooling kit at the top, right? With the power supply at the bottom of the case, cabling your drives is a nightmare. Power cables are designed to be strung top to bottom. This case forces you to run a line up to the top device, then turn around and drop back down. The leaves big, bending loops of wire that obstruct air flow and crowd your hardware.
You're not going to be able to turn the blue fan LED's off, something that should have been a no-brainer for those of us putting PCs in our bedrooms.
There are other big cases. Buy one of them, instead.
pcwizmtl
August 10, 2008 at 9:44am
I love the 900... but it gets really cramped when you stuff that hardware...
I agree with the reviewer, wider. I'd even replace that wimpy side fan with a fan equivalent to the top fan.. or bigger.
I dont agree with the front panel either, it looks better on the 900 in my opinion.
Can you say, Antec 1200 Deluxe edition? :P
brokenmoth08
August 06, 2008 at 7:46pm
i think it was a little bit of an unfair review. the 900 had all the same flaws, and it was in best-of-the-best for a long time until it was copied by another company. It's a good case.
TheMurph
August 11, 2008 at 1:54pm
You said it yourself: the Nine Hundred had all the same flaws. While it was the best-of-the-best for its time, there are far better cases -- including full-tower cases -- than a (slightly larger) carbon-copy of the Nine Hundred's design.
mlee19
August 06, 2008 at 3:03pm
Doesn't look bad but I think I will stick with my Coolermaster Cosmos.
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