As you can see the case comes in a black decor and sports numerous fans. We can appreciate having most of the fan mounts already occupied by a fan when we open the box as it saves some installation time but more importantly keeps us from spending more money. While the four fans, one of which is a massive 200mm, provide sufficient cooling there are two primary downsides: noise and dust. The high amount of fans quickly create your own little dust box, especially on the front grill where it is disgustingly evident on the black paint. Each of the included fans has a three step switch offering a low, medium, and high speed setting. Each step is significantly louder than the next. We found the low setting to be decent but you lose cooling ability and overheating could become an issue depending on your hardware. If you hear beeps coming from the case, it is probably your motherboard temperature alarms going off and you should power off the PC and increase the fan speeds. This may also be the solution if you're getting random reboots that are focused primarily when you're gaming to doing other stressful tasks.

The case doesn't come with an included PSU which when compared with other cases does make the price seem a bit high. However you also have to take into consideration the features on the case you're getting and that the PSU's included in other cases aren't always that great. Speaking of the PSU, Antec has included rubber pads to help keep the PSU in place and it also lets air circulate underneath the PSU.

The back of the case has 7 expansion bays as well as the usual shield layout however with the release of E-SATA (External Serial ATA) Antec has provide two rubber-covered "ports" through which you can weave S-ATA cables (or any others that you're PC or mods might require) for your peripherals. Also Antec has made a very small, but highly beneficial, tweak to the case design. They've added holes in the bottom corners. Amazing? Actually, yes. If you've ever put together a PC you know that you'll drop screws especially if you have large digits. You'll drop a screw when mounting your motherboard, or putting in optical drives, somewhere along the line, and it'll bounce around in the case. With all the small spaces it can sometimes be hard to find and traditionally this is where the shaking of the case commences. With the Antec Nine Hundred you just have to tip the case a bit and the screw will drop out of one of the corner holes.

Instead of mounting the common set of USB/FireWire/Audio connectors on the front of the case Antec opted to mount these on the top of the case with the power and reset switch as well. There is also a tray on top for those peripherals, like your MP3 player, that you may plug into the USB port. The tray is a simple idea but comes in handy no matter where around your desk your PC is. Another thing to mention is that there isn't a power LED but just a HDD activity LED. This isn't an issue at all as your HDD activity light serves as enough of a power status indicator anyways, not to mention the fact that if you keep the stock fans on the case you'll have a glowing blue box if it is powered up.

With the massive size of some cases today the Nine Hundred is relatively small. It has just enough room to house a full ATX board as well as optical drives and full hard disk cages. However everything does fit and we managed to cram a full SLI rig with a QX6850 and dual nVidia cards in there with nearly a terabyte of storage.One thing you might consider doing is that if you're not using the bay fan on the middle HDD cage is removing it to gain some extra wiggle room which we needed when installing our ASUS Striker Extreme.

Why 900? We're not really sure but we assume it has something to do with the fact that the case has 9 bays. These bays are available to be configured in different ways and easily installed. One of the best features about the bays is that they load from the front. This is really great for the oversized PCI-E cards on the market today which can make conventional hard drive installation a challenge. We suggest that you install hard drives first but leave the cage out the front and just attach the cables if you have multiple hard drives before you slide the cage in — then install the graphics cards. One of our systems with three HDDs ran into this issue. With it's ASUS Striker motherboard, it runs right up to the edge of the ends of our storage drives making the insertion of the SATA power and data lines impossible. Because the PSU is situated at the bottom of the case you can choose to put in the PSU after the motherboard without any big issues but putting it in first is still a good idea in our book.

Antec is one of the biggest names in custom computing today and their release of the Antec Nine Hundred doesn't disappoint. Offering room for expansion both with opticals and hard disk drives and sporting a simple design while showing off your hardware via it's side window the Nine Hundred is sure to please any user. That said if you're looking for a case to mod we would look elsewhere as the Nine Hundred seems to lean more towards users who just want a nice looking case without doing any modifications of their own. With some creative thinking you could come up with a way to mod it, certainly. It has potential but isn't simple enough to give a modder a constraint free experiment. As with everything you buy we suggest that you do your research, take a look through the pictures here, and what we've said about the case then make your own decision. Overall we think the Nine Hundred from Antec is worth buying if you're looking for a sturdy air-cooled case that gives you plenty of room for expansion.

Thanks goes to Antec for making this review possible.