Gadgetory

well I promised I'd do a bit of a follow-up to the antec dark fleet 85 and here it is I spent some time tonight doing a build inside it so I've actually put my my 3d vision surround rig which was on my high speed pc tech station and i went and put it into the dark fleet 85 so there's a couple topics i didn't really cover in enough detail when i did my initial unboxing ah the first one of which is these these are not a very good idea because it's just a random door that you need to open in order to get your cd-rom drive like it's not automatic or anything you can't just press the button and then like it'll open it's just yeah I'm pretty amazed that that made it onto this case um one other thing that I didn't talk about before that I had wrong was that you just push here in order to open the fleet swap days I was kind of forcing them but yeah you just push on this side it releases this latch right here that is how to get them open another thing that I should have showed you before was the fan filters these are pretty clever so they just go right on to each fan you pull out the little tab right here pull that out pull it up clean it out and then you just slide it right back in so that's a pretty cool feature of this case one other thing I didn't really talk about enough was the fleet swap base so here I'm going to go ahead and open up all of the all the doors and I'm going to look inside and I hope there's enough light for you to see in there but gate ouch my cell phone fan okay so here are the fleet swap back planes here and um there aren't a whole lot of places you can put them unfortunately the spot sort of the bad news because anywhere next to these video cards actually i'll talk more about that on the side I guess so fleet swap base so in theory I guess you could install if you bought more of these or if you just slid hard drive straight in you could install up to 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 hard drives which would be a pretty tremendous capacity but then if you come around to the side you run into a bit of a problem just going to go ahead and pull the side panel off the case looks great with the red lights by the way looks really good I mean no product is perfect though so the problem you run into here is that the fleet swap base add so much bulk to the drive cages that you can install them anywhere near the graphics cards I mean these aren't terribly long graphics cards these are gtx 480 s they're only about 9 inches long there are cards that are longer on the market and already they'd be right up against these SATA interfaces on the fleet swap pace and actually I mean because you have to route four cables to it to say to data to say to power you'd end up with most of it being blocked by the 24-pin connector up here and this is the top slot and then even down at the bottom you'd end up i mean i'm using a modular power supply but it has a fair number of pre patch cables and you've end up with kind of a clutter here and then on the other side these are so full of cables that you wouldn't be able to slide hard drives in there anyway and then you can't use any of the ones in between so the fleet swap brackets are a bit of a Miss I think but the good news is that you can install hard drives without them you just slide them in and then you gain that extra inch in a bid almost of space and you can just plug the cables directly into the backs of the hard drives just like with the antec 1200 so what else did I want to talk about on this case I really like the fans they haven't really changed the way the fan management is done versus the 1200 you can change all of the fan speeds around here at the back with that little panel up there next to this fan so you can switch them from high to low and vice versa and i believe the fans actually get brighter when you change the switches i'm having trouble finding one that gets brighter for me but they do they do you can install a fairly long power supply you can see I've got a Quattro 1200 in here and what else did I want to talk about a fair number of front panel connectors you can see I've got them routed through that hole right there fits very very tall you heat sinks that actually got a co gage arrow in here right now and even with the heat pipes sticking up right there you can see we've still got maybe a centimeter or centimeter and a half of space left once we closed a side panel so that's pretty good what else do I want to talk about on this case yeah I wouldn't have minded seeing a little bit more in terms of cable management on the back right now you don't really have a whole lot of options as the bad news because I mean basically everything has to come from it's going to lose the strap here it is make it hard for you to hold the camera basically everything has to come from this hole right here and you've only got about well here you've got this much space between the motherboard back plate and then where the side panel goes on so it's not even like if you compare the thickness of a 24 pin power connector to the thickness you have here you can't you can't even really route any cables behind the motherboard tray and expect to be able to close the case so by the time you run an 8-pin up to the cpu a 24-pin over here some say two cables up to your optical bays potentially some say two cables over to your fleet swap some molex to your front fans some molex to your rear fans you run all of your front panel connectors including your USB your audio you kind of wind up in a little bit of trouble and what I wish had been included because you see all this space here like this is quite this is quite deep the space behind the hard drive cages I wish something like that could have been turned into a place to hide cables because right now you see there's actually there's no gap here there's no way to bring cables from the power supply up into here everything has to has to pass over this this lip of metal here we're really there's not enough space to close the panel over top of it so that was one of the challenges that I ran into with this case one thing that I did like though was that the back cpu cooler access is very well positioned for my motherboard here I have easy access to the the back plate of the CPU cool I'm using right now and I'll be able to easily swap that out if I should so desire anyway thank you for checking out my more detailed look at the antec dark fleet 85 I've got my SSD installed here and since it's just a direct say to hook up it's obviously running at full speed so I've got windows running and yeah I think that pretty much covers everything oh yeah there's the front slots so we got reset free USB 2.1 USB 3.0 front audio and power oh yeah yeah I should show you how to hook up the USB 3.0 USB 3.0 behind the motherboard up here okay up here under the video cards and then out the back panel through a little plate that may provide okay so you can see it right here and then I just plugged that into the USB 3 port on the back of the motherboard that's the way all USB 3.1 plement ations work right now because there is no standardized pin out so you pretty much have to run a standard USB cable plug around to the back your case there's no other real way to do it right now thank you for watching don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips for more tech tips and just plain tech and sometimes my cats