Antec P50 Case - coming soon

[acemodder]

Looking at £50 inc VAT.

* Dual Chamber - motherboard on one side, PSU and HDDs behind the motherboard tray in a seperate chamber.
* 240mm rad in the front, 240mm rad in the top!!!!

[CustardInc]

Oooh, looks good. A bit like a BitFenix Phenom M, but with a better layout and look. A Phenom M combined with a Corsair Air 240.

Only negative I can see if the lack of rubber grommets, other than that it looks very nice

Edit: Okay never mind, a new set of pictures has rubber grommets in place. However now I can see that this case is 5mm too short for my graphics card

[acemodder]

[TeeBlack]

i like this case. is there any price difference with the windowed panel vs solid panel? is their a release date for this case yet?

[Biscuit]

I see this is up for pre-order on scan with no ETA. Would be good to find out a rough idea of when this will appear. Im certainly interested in the windowless model (which isnt currently showing on scan).

[acemodder]

Hi

It is due to arrive last week of May / first week of June into our European Hub.

We only have the windowed version being introduced to the EU market place I'm afraid.

[Biscuit]

Will the solid side panel even be available as an optional extra?
If not it probably rules the case out for me.

[flyingsquirrel]

Hi all,

I've just signed up to this forum to say that I've finally managed to get my hands on this case! Waited over a month for it to come in stock and picked it up a few days ago.

My initial impressions are that it seems well made and is of decent quality, especially considering the price. I haven't built the system yet but planning to do so at the weekend.

Good Points:
- Decent build quality, painted inside and out.
- No sharp edges inside. I think this may be the first time I build a PC without cutting myself on the case.
- dust filters on the front intake and the PSU intake.
- Compact dimensions, one of the few mATX cases which are less than 350mm long.
- Full sized optical disc drive slot! Really hard to find a small case which has not abandoned optical media. What sort of a HTPC can't play blu-rays?!

Bad Points:
- Does not have rubber grommets for cable management. Some photos of the P50 show it without grommets, other photos (including the picture on the box itself) show it with grommets. However, this shouldn't be a major issue since there are no sharp edges in the cut-outs.
- Rubbish manual. The instructions are the usual antec garbage and don't really add much. The case comes with some rubber stickers and it's not obvious where to use them (turns out they are for the PSU mount).
- Front panel removal design is daft, you literally yank it off the front like some sort of vandal. I'd prefer some kind of latch or something.
- Intakes for front fans are unnecessarily restrictive. They should have made it a massive opening (like the top fan mounts) but instead its just a series of drilled holes. I haven't started this build so I have no idea how much extra noise this adds.

Other notes:
- CPU backplate cutout is a nice addition but once you fit a PSU, the entire hole is covered. I think you also need to remove the HDD rack (not sure how to) in order to access the whole backplate.
- Included 2 x 120 mm fans are the 3-pin type, so you could power & control them from your motherboard if you wish. The included 80 mm fan has no speed control option and takes power from a 4 pin molex.
- fan controller takes power from a 4 pin molex and has four connectors for 3-pin fans. Due to the 'socket' design of the fan controller, it is not possible to fit 4-pin fans to the controller.
- Switches on the fan controller are 3-position (low/med/high I assume) and easy to operate.
- Power and reset buttons on the top are functional but feel a bit cheap and unsatisfying to press. It's like those cars with fancy red "ENGINE START" buttons which looks like it should have a nice mechanical operation, but instead they only depress by 1mm and feel cheap and tacky.
- Four PCI slot backplates. Don't know if this matters to everyone, but I think it makes it impossible to fit a double-width graphics card in the last slot. Maybe this is normal for mATX cases.

Overall, I'm happy with this case. If any of you have questions I will try to answer them!