Antec Skeleton Open Air Case Review

Installation cont.


Once we had the motherboard and cabling taken care of, it was time to install the drives. Two optical and two disk drives can be installed internally.


The optical drive was quite easy to install. The clip to the right of the drive held it in place while a screw secured it from the exterior.

Space is definitely an issue here though, unfortunately. With the optical drive fully inserted, there is only about an inch of clearance to get cables in place. We’d suggest connecting the cables prior to inserting the drives. Some extra long optical drives may not fit in the Skeleton.


Installing the hard drive was pretty straight forward and there is quite a bit more space behind it. It mounts just like the optical drive with clips and screws.


Antec’s 92mm fan simply clips into place and is an appropriate size for cooling a pair of 3.5” drives. We fished the 4-pin molex connector behind the drive where we were able to reach the PSU leads.


Antec includes brackets to mount up to four hard drives outside of the case. While we think their intentions were good giving buyers an option to install additional drives, we can’t help but wish they even bothered with this. The drives are held on only by a couple of hooks and the force of gravity. There is also the potential for the drives to be banged around very easily outside of the case which could ruin your precious hard drives. Although the entire concept of an open air case is somewhat risky to the hardware, we feel that this feature crosses the line and that its use should be avoided.


Once we had all of the hardware installed, the Skeleton was an impressive sight. No case window is required to take a peek at your hardware!


Acoustic and Initial Running Impressions


Once we had powered up the Skeleton, we were greeted with quite a light show. There are several different LED configurations that can be selected including one that constantly fades between all of the various colour combinations. LED fans are definitely not for everyone and are a mater of personal tastes.

Fancy lights aside, Antec’s “Super Big Boy” fan is very quiet and as expected, provides a lot of airflow to motherboard components and the graphics card. It was also a pleasant surprise to see that the massive fan was barely audible at its lowest setting and still very quiet at full throttle. The hard drives were also kept nice and cool thanks to the 92mm fan that provides a healthy amount of airflow while remaining quiet.

Overall, the Antec Skeleton provides very good cooling while keeping fan noise to a minimum.