A Look Inside
As we take a look inside the case the first thing that I notice is that the entire thing is painted black. Many case companies are doing this and it is good to see Antec doing this as well. Looking over where your power supply would be placed there are 4 rubber risers that will lift your power supply up to get some air under it. I would have liked to see some sort of ventilation under the power supply though.
Above the power supply placement you have your expansion slot covers. The bottom cover is different and you will see why later in the review. There are 2 water cooling tube fittings here, they are pretty large. Moving up you have 4 fans, 2 rear and 2 top fans. The 2 rear fans are 120mm red LED fans, which also have red fins. The 2 top fans are 140mm fans.
There is sure a lot of room for storage in the DF-85; you have room for 9 hard drives! You may be wondering what those fittings are on the top and the bottom of the hard drive cage. They are what Antec calls the Fleet Swap drive system. These interchangeable fittings allow you to connect your power and data cables to the connectors on the fitting then all you have to do is slide your drive into the other side. This not only makes for easy installation but makes swapping out drives extremely easy.
Moving up there is room for 3 5.25-inch drives. These use the typical locking system that we are used to seeing on many cases. I’m glad Antec got rid of those annoying rails you had to install on all of your devices. While we are looking at the front of the case there is a lever that will lock the front doors of the case. This is good because you don’t want them opening up when you are transporting the case.
Just like all new cases you have a CPU cutout on the motherboard tray and there are also cable routing holes that will make routing your cables easier and make things look much cleaner. Also included with the case is the mounting hardware, cable ties and a product overview.
Not bad case, thanks the review 😉
It's not a bad review, but I do think you've missed quite a few points here.
1) From a case in this price-range you would expect a screw-less installation method for 5,25″ drives. Same goes for the expansion slots at the back. People don't pay $190 to use a screwdriver.
2) There is no mention of the speed that the hot-swappable 3,5″ and 2,5″ slots can handle. Since SSD's are now breaking SATA 2 speeds, it is especially important to know if the external 2,5″ slot can handle SATA 3 speeds.
3) You said: “The only real problem I found with this case is that you cannot install an optical drive in the top 5.25-inch drive bay because the top 140mm fan gets in the way. So if for some reason you have 3 optical drives you are out of luck installing all of them in this case.”
Since when are 5,25″ bays only capable of housing optical drives? There must be at least a few dozen reservoirs for water-cooling that also wouldn't fit in that top slot. And what about some of the 5,25″ units you get with sound-cards?
4) There is also no mention of water-cooling compatibility anywhere beyond the rubber holes in the back. It would be nice to let people know if a 280-rad will fit in the top and if the top is also compatible with the more standard 120 and 240 rads(or just 120mm fans for that matter).
5) You write nothing about the sound of the fans(at different settings). It would be nice to know how they perform.
6) I also see nothing about the compatibility of a long video-card with an HDD behind it. I think people would like to know if their video-cards will block their HDD slots from usage.
Maybe in your next review you can also mention these points. Your readers would thank you.