The Antec Nine Hundred – Ultimate Gamer Case

Rants, Raves, Opinions

This case is definitely one of the best cases we have looked at and had the pleasure of using. It provides ample cooling for those of you who do not want to mess with liquid cooling and without the sacrifice of your hearing. Although we had a couple gripes about the case, these issues did not keep us from enjoying all this case had to offer.

Antec provided a few cable ties already attached to the case to assist in keeping the case’s interior as smooth as the exterior. The problem is thats about all the help you’re going to get. Don’t worry, this case has enough space in it that it still allows you to be creative, as long as your cables allow. As we said during the installation, the biggest fault in this case is the royal pain in the rear the hard drive mounting is. If Antec could make a few changes to the cable issue and creating a simpler way to mount the hard drives, this case goes from a home run to an Albert Pujols Grand Slam.

Now that weve aired our beefs, lets reiterate what we love about this case. Since all the fans shipped with the case have 3 settings you can tune them to fit your personal noise level and cooling needs. At medium settings the case fans are still quieter than the Tuniq Tower at its medium setting. The fans cool everything that we want to keep cool! In most cases you have to sacrifice cooling of the hard drives, or airflow is compromised to the rest of the system due to some elaborate hard drive mounting scheme. Not so with the Nine Hundred.

While it isnt a giant case it is wide enough to accommodate even the biggest CPU heatsinks we could throw at it. We also absolutely love the removable hard drive cages, and power/reset switches on the top of the case.

With the power supply bay located at the bottom of the case, you can keep the excess slack from the power supply cables from hanging all over your CPU cooler and memory. Plus as most everyone knows, power supplies can get heavy and moving this weight to the bottom of the case allows for a little bit extra stability (not that this case needs it.)

The blue LEDs are either love it or hate it or something you can grow to love. If you dont like them they are easily replaced. I wasnt sure about them initially but after a couple of weeks with the case now feel that they add a certain flair and also double perfectly as a night light.

So you can see, at least in our eyes, the good far outweigh the not so good. Finishing out the purchase decision ultimately boils down to price, and the Nine Hundred is all over the scale. The price ranges from a low price of $99 at Outpost.com all the way to $170 at Best Buy. Note: at the time of this writing Outpost has a $40 mail-in-rebate on this case which makes it a screaming deal at $60! Most sites retail this case just about $115 and at that price is a good buy.

Legit Bottom Line: If you are building the ultimate gaming machine then do not pass this case up. Antec has delivered with the Nine Hundred what some much more expensive cases can’t.