A Closer Look - Inside

To access the interior, simply remove the thumbscrews that hold each of the larger panels in place. Antec employs firmly attached drop-down covers for the bottom compartment. These can be dropped down by pushing a large square button in the back. Unfortunately, the contraption does not hold in place well, so the small covers kept opening up on their own as I wrote this review up. So often that I left them open. On a positive note, Antec did line these with a thin sound-dampening material, while the larger top panels only have a thin lining of a material that resembles plastic.

The entire interior is black; that is, with except of its expansion slot covers. The quality of the metal frame is excellent, and there is a huge opening in the mainboard's tray, so you will be able to access a CPU backplate without having to remove the entire board to do so. There are a number of smaller holes, lined with rubber grommets, around the mainboard's area, and there are numerous large cutouts to attach zip ties to. Another interesting aspect are the two large openings in the very top of the tray. These allow you to route cables through to the upper edges of the mainboard, for example.


Antec also includes some extra cable-tying possibilities within the chassis, and with a whooping 30 mm of space for cables in the area, you should not have any problems hiding everything nicely within the Antec Nineteen Hundred.


Starting with the bottom compartment, there are six hard-drive trays here, but you will find six more for 3.5'' drives in the main chamber. There are clips on these bays for two 120 mm fans. The bays may also be used for 2.5'' variants, but Antec also designed the chassis in such a way as to include two additional bays for SSDs and the like. The three 5.25'' bays above those are equipped with a tool-less system out of solid plastic locks that employ metal pins to hold a drive in place. It will be interesting to see how well these work.


The two PSU bays in the bottom do not hold any surprises, aside from the air vent for the one on top. Above those are the nine mainboard expansion slots, each with a separate cover and thumbscrew. There are also two large openings to route water-cooling tubes through. You will find one of the aforementioned fans in the very top. A small PCB in this area allows you to power up to four units with a single Molex connector, which cuts down on the cable clutter. Antec ships the Nineteen Hundred pre-wired, but the cabling is rather messy. We rewired everything to clean it up for the final build.


You can clearly see the mess of cables due to the three pre-installed fans in these pictures. Two of those are in the ceiling and may also be used for liquid-cooling setups.


Before we dive into the assembly process, let us take a quick look at the cables. All of them are black and of the standard variety. Since the Nineteen Hundred comes equipped with six USB connectors, you will find the corresponding number of cables leading to each set of plugs. Antec also equips the USB 3.0 variants with connectors for USB 2.0 if you rather have them attached to those headers on your motherboard.