Installation

Antec gave the P182B quite a bit of tool less features, but the motherboard tray is not one of them, it’s not removable and sits fixed inside in the case. On the upside you can easily remove the hard drive bays, which gives you more room to work with when installing your motherboard.

A turn of a thumbscrew is all it takes to remove these two drive bays:



The top HDD bay has a small compartment that can be used for storing small screws, nifty!



Both bays have white rubber anti-vibration rings, these are mounted on the removable racks on the top bay:



The bottom bay features no removable racks but can hold more drives too (2 vs 4).



Optical drives use plug and play drive rails and sit sturdy inside the case:



The Antec P182B offers plenty of good features to make installation easier; but so far none really stand out from crowd, until you see this photo:



That’s nothing special one might say, it’s the same as the P180, right? Not quite, Antec moved the motherboard panel slightly inwards, creating room for cables to hide behind the panel, thus helping reduce cable clutter. A very useful feature which I hope they continue to include in future cases.

They have also increased the size of the passage between the upper and lower part of the case, so you can push more cables through, a plastic cover can be slid back/forwards to minimize the gap:



The power supply is installed inside its own rubber strip surrounded cage at the bottom of the case



But here I did encounter some issues worth mentioning, if you a longer power supply unit, the cables coming out of the PSU will interfere with the 120mm fan installed there. In our case, the Antec TruePower Trio was small enough to not let this happen.



Things aren’t much better on the other side of the fan, where the SATA cables come uncomfortably close to the fan too.



The solution of course is to completely remove the bottom 120mm fan, we’ll see in our performance tests if that has a measurable impact.

While fitting the large NVIDIA 8800GTX card we almost ran into problems, if we had been using the top hard drive bay, if we remove the racks, it fits with millimeters to spare:



Installation continues on the next page ->