Moving inside
Looking inside of the Twelve Hundred we can now clearly see one of the steps Antec took to bring the styling up a notch from the Nine Hundred. All of the major interior parts of the Twelve Hundred are blacked out. The front I/O cabling is more than long enough to reach your motherboard connections, even when routed behind the motherboard tray. Speaking of which, I think this is the point where the Nine Hundred owners either got very happy or very upset: Antec made cable management very nice and easy for the Twelve Hundred by adding several pass-through holes for cables.
With the right side panel off we can get a good look at the cable routing holes and tie down spots on the back of the mother board tray.
Back on the left side looking at the back we can see the rear 120mm fans. The fans are powered with 4 pin molex connectors, which means controlling the fans with fan controller isn’t an option without some modifications.
On the floor of the case are 4 isolation pads for the power supply to sit on.
Like the Nine Hundred all the hard drive cages are held in with thumb screws -- 8 each, to be exact. With the cage screw removed the drive cage slides nicely out the front. With the cage out and in your hand you will get a good idea where the some of the Twelve Hundred's weight comes from. I’ve seen some bulky cages before, but these are monsters.
Behind each of fans is a removable screen. To clean these you will have to remove all the cage screws to slide it out of the case far enough to pull the screen out.
In the lower right corner of each cage is the fan speed control knob. The knobs themselves are not very noticeable, but they do stick out from the face of the case, and I’m not to sure how these would hold up to traveling to LAN parties.
Like I said before, the drive cages are beefy; one look from the end and you can see what I mean. The cages of the Nine Hundred were similar, and there were some issues with ease of mounting hardware installation. This too has been fixed; we will cover that in the next section. One thing I did notice was not present was the lack of drive isolator pads. This is an option I have grown to like in the performance series. They cut down vibration and noise from the disk drives.
If you don’t need space for 12 hard drives you can lighten your load by removing some of the cages. The front intake fan housing just snaps into the drive cage.
Once it is removed, you can use the hardware provided to mount the fan into the front of the case without the drive cage. They attach the same as the normal 5.25�bay covers.
The normal 5.25�bay covers are mesh type like those covering the fans. Instead of a filter screen backing, there is high density foam. I am still trying to understand why they used the foam over a screen.
With all the drive covers and cages removed we find a little tray at the top of the case. This is what Antec calls the water cooling platform. This is to give the end user a place to mount a water cooling pump or reservoir.
