Due to the face lift of the aging Three Hundred model, the installation of the following hardware was a breeze :

• Asus Sabretooth X79 mainboard
• Intel 3960X OC'ed at 4.5Ghz 1.37Vcore
• Corsair Hydro80 cooling
• 16Gb G.Skill RipjawsZ 2133C9 rams
• GTX480 Fermi graphic card
• 3 x Western Digital 1TB Caviar Green Hard Drives
• Corsair TX850 Power Supply.

As you see obtaining a clean build is easy to achieve. The backside of the motherboard tray has got plenty of room to facilitate tucking away the cables. We did not install the SSD on the backside. Why ? When installing the SSD with 4 screws, it's impossible to achieve this with the mobo in position. A simple plastic tray would be far more practical. We had almost no issues when installing the hardware. Just for the PSU we had to bend the little clip, whihc is just positioned above. Antec better should remove the clip as it has close to no issue.

Now let's fire this PC up and see how the cooling performance is of this Antec Three Hundred Two case. With the 3960X priming ( custom set 12-12K) at 1.37 Vcore we could read out the following temperatures via Realtemp. For the GPU we used Futuremarks 3DMark Vantage as test and GPU-Z for the sensor readouts :

We tested the case with the two fan speeds. At low speed the fans are audible, 36dBA was measured. At high speed setting the noise level went up to 45dBa. Which is rather disturbing. The CPU temperatures got partly influenced by the extra fan speed. This due to the fact that one fan was hooked up to the Corsair H80 Hydro unit. But most importantly was the 4°C difference at the PWM area. We've seen temperatures with the same hardware at around 91°C in some enclosures. The top fan is very effective in exhausitng the heat. All in all very acceptable temperatures for the Antec Three Hundred Two.