Gadgetory

it baffles me how I could have gone so long without ever unboxing an antique 300 so here we are today it's not a new product by any stretch of the imagination but we have the antique 300 it is SSD hard drive compatible which it wasn't when it was first released this is a fairly old skew but still very popular and ok so they're calling it a versatile minis are you know like I even featured it in a in an airflow optimization guide a while back it just must have maybe I shot an unboxing and never actually uploaded it either way picture of the case on the side filtered front panel takes in air efficiently and prevents dust buildup that's good okay we've got our features and specs on the side here and let's just go ahead and start getting this open so the UNTAC 300 if you go to any kind of a land party there's a couple cases that you're going to see just a ton up you're going to see a ton of 900s you're going to see a ton of 300s this is a very very common common case because it provides you gamer type features such as optimized airflow mesh fronts at a price point that is very very attractive alright so the first thing we find when we open up the box is an tex characteristically excellent packaging here you go so you can see they're using a closed cell foam that is going to protect your case from any damage that could potentially occur in transit so we've got a good inch plus of foam on all sides of the chassis very very nice to see that we've got some documentation in here including a user's manual and yep should give you some idea how old the box design is despite its eminently portable frame the 300 has enough room for an Nvidia 8800 series graphics card how impressive we're up to the GTX 500 series at this point for several generations away from with an Nvidia 8800 series was a concern whether it would fit in your case or not it goes to show you that the development cycles for cases are not quite as fast as they are for graphics cards nor do they need to be if you have a well featured plastic looking suitcase then you don't really need to redo it for quite some time all right here it is the 300 so you find first of all the mesh front you've got three five and a quarter inch bays and then you have dual 120 millimeter intakes in the front of the case so these are filtered intakes although I'm not actually sure how the filters come out for this particular one it does not come preloaded with fans there but at least it does give you the option of adding them so that you have airflow going directly over your graphics cards or graphics card I guess if you don't run to which most people don't from the front of the chassis nice thumb screws those nice wide thumb screws so it's easier to get a grip on them then the then the smaller head thumb screws we're going to take side panels off so the side panels use a pretty standard finish it's not quite that super matte finish but it's also not glossy so it's going to be fairly fingerprint resistant but not perfect I mean if you keep your case reasonably clean it's not really a concern on the side you can see we've got a punch out for a 120 millimeter fan so that's going to blow directly over your graphics card so it's all about graphics card cooling the way I would probably set this case up for optimal cooling would be to 120 millimeters as intakes in the front and then I would set this one right here up as an exhaust because most cards these days I mean it depends what you're using but if you have an Nvidia reference card for example it's going to be drawing air in on this side and kicking it out on this side so you want to you want to help it rather than work against it so let's look at the inside of the case as you can see it's a fairly basic chassis in terms of its construction we've got one two three four five six five three and a half inch drive bays we have our SSD mount here at the bottom so you can see they've retrofitted it with that so you're just going to screw these in from the bottom you can mount one SSD here and it can still support its full complement of three and a half inch drives even if you do that there are the mounts for your five and a quarter inch so there's no tooless stuff going on in this chassis it's very basic I mean to lists if you're only going to build the system once isn't that big of a deal it's only if you're doing frequent modding you're going to want to consider maybe getting a higher end chassis such as the 900 which uses thumb screws to mount the drives for example all right here we've got our motherboard tray which features a nice big cutout so no matter where your motherboard positions the CPU socket you shouldn't have any problems swapping out a CPU cooler even if I you have a backplate on the back of it so you can just take that off and you don't have to take out the motherboard or anything like that here's power for our top 140 millimeter fan we've got all of our front leads for the front power switch front lights actually what do we have on the front of this case let's have a look so we have two front USB two ports we have a microphone port headphone port and a power switch well okay there's a reset switch in there so it's hard to hit by accident that's a really thoughtful feature actually all right mother word mount you've got room for your standard ATX motherboards you're not going to get much longer you're not going to get much wider it's got your standard seven PCI slots bottom mounted power supply this is one of the first value chassis that did offer the feature of the bottom mounted power supply remember ntek did pioneer that with the p180 at least on the mainstream I mean there's always on water who's done it before someone else but they were the first ones who brought a mass production case to market with a bottom mounted power supply okay we've got a 120 millimeter fan in the back that comes pre-populated with a 120 millimeter fan this is one of their tri cool fans so you can set it to low medium or high the one on is actually not a try cool so that one runs at full speed regardless so the total fans that you can populate in this case are 140 up in the top 120 in the back and then two more 120 s in the front as intakes alright in terms of accessories there's not a whole lot going on here this is our entire accessory box thumbscrews other screws that's it so if you want you know fancy add-ons then look elsewhere I suppose cable management so we've got a little we've got little zip ties back here for managing cables on the side of the drive cage so this will allow you to hide your cables if you're using a non modular power supply you can just bundle them all up here time down and that would probably be the best way to go about that so I think that's pretty much all I have to say about 300 I don't think I ever showed a view from the back so that's what it looks like if you haven't seen one before don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips from Ron boxing's reviews and 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