Antec Eleven Hundred hands on preview

By now youve most likely already seen our hands on preview of the new Antec P280, but for those of you that arent so concerned about noise and that are looking for something with a bit better cooling performance and maybe something with a see through side panel, we give you the Antec Eleven Hundred preview. Although the two chassis are quite similar, there are also some major differences that well take a quick look at here.

As you can see, the front of the two chassis is similar, yet very different. Gone is the door of the P280 and in its place we have a clean looking mesh fascia. The location of the front ports and the buttons are the same though, although the top 120mm fans are now replaced by a single 200mm fan. The only slight downside of this is that Antec hasnt allowed for any space for a watercooler kit to be fitted internally.

Popping the side of the chassis you can see that the two are nearly identical inside, but as youll see from the video, the hard drive mounting trays have been replaced with a pair of simpler brackets and although they dont reduce vibrations as efficiently, theyre easier to attach to the drives. This does of course also mean that if you intended to kit out your system with eight SSDs youre going to need to have to get adapters for six of those SSDs.

As far as we can tell, everything else has remained the same internally and as with the P280, the Eleven Hundred has a front and bottom fitted dust filter. As you might notice in the pictures, the Eleven Hundred is using a single fan controller for all the pre-installed fans, rather than a separate fan controller for each of the fans. The advantage of this is that you can easily control up to four fans and they all draw power from a single Molex power connector, although the downside is less optimization as all the fans will have their speed reduced or increased by the same amount.

We missed to snap a shot of the side panel of the Eleven Hundred, but youll see it clearly in the video below. Instead of having the extra lamination fitted to reduce noise, the left side panel has a Perspex window with place for two 120mm fans and the right hand panel has space for one 120mm fan to go behind the motherboard, although this means that youd have to route your cables around the fan. The Eleven Hundred has an MSRP price of US$129.95 (S$169) and might just hit retail in time for the holiday season.