Installation

Installing the mainboard is quite straight forward. Antec has already placed some spacers for a mATX board at the specific locations, but three of them needed to be added by hand. The mainboard connectors for the front I/O and the power, reset and LEDs are quite straight forward and just like any other found in most cases these days.


Antec has supplied plenty of screws to secure the optical drive. These come in a separate bag to avoid any confusion between the larger variants used for the mainboard and hard drive. Installing the optical drive is quite easy as well. There are two possible positions, but one was so far off, that it could be eliminated by simply looking at the overall construction and fit of the drive cage.


The hard drive screws are far from normal. These are required as Antec is using rubber spacers to absorb vibrations of any installed hard drives. The installation of the hard drives may seem simple at first, but the bottom screws to secure the drive in place at a vertical position need to be screwed in at the bottom of the case. This means that you will either install the hard drives first and flip over an empty case or, as it was the case here, carefully stand up the already filled case to gain access to the screw holes on the bottom of the case. Antec should have supplied fixed metal prongs with a rubber spacer on the bottom of the case instead, to eliminate such a problem.


The LCD panel is connected to the USB header of the mainboard or routed through the case out back and plugged into a normal USB port. This type of connector can only be found on Soundgraph VFDs. The supplied software and functionality of the display is identical to that of the Soundgraph iMON VFD we reviewed in the past, but simply without the remote control or IR receiver.