Antec P183 Mid-Tower Case Review

Cooling Performance


Although the P183 does decently in our charts with respect to CPU cooling performance, it is not quite as effective as some of the other cases we’ve tested to date. This fact more than likely stems from a lack of intake airflow in the P183 with its default fan configuration. We’ll see shortly if installing optional intake fans can further improve the P183’s CPU cooling performance.


The motherboard sensor in the Asus M3A78-T is located between the two PCI-Express 16x slots, so lower temperatures read by this sensor usually equate to lower GPU temperatures. Thanks to the dual 80CFM fans in the P183, the strong exhaust flow helps to get the warm air from around the expansion slots out of the case. Considering there was no intake airflow for this test, we were pleasantly surprised by the results.


Since our two HD 3850s are not identical, GPU1 is always a few degrees toastier than GPU2. Please note that this has more to do with the cards themselves than their relative positioning in the case.

Even without a single intake fan installed in the P183, it was able to surpass the Cooler Master Storm Scout and Thermaltake Spedo in GPU cooling performance. Because the Radeon HD3850s do not directly exhaust hot air out of the case, the two powerful TriCool fans and overall negative pressure in the P183 do an admirable job of getting it out. We’ll see what kind of effect slowing the fans down plays in GPU cooling shortly.


We see a very similar trend with the GPUs at idle, although there is very little variation between the cases we’ve tested to date.


Hard drive cooling is an often overlooked aspect of case cooling, but it is perhaps one of the most important. It is a fact that hard drives kept cool outlive hard drives that run at higher temperatures. This becomes even more important with high-RPM drives like the Western Digital Raptor series. As you can see, the drive in the open bench configuration received no active cooling, and quickly exceeded 40°C.

Because there is no intake fans installed in the P183 by default, we were actually expecting pretty poor hard drive temperatures. As you can see above, we were certainly wrong. Antec’s multi-chamber design in the P183 certainly helps to keep the warm air from the toasty CPU and video cards away from the hard drive. Because the PSU is exhausting air from that lower chamber, it is also providing a slightly negative pressure that delivers a small amount of airflow around the hard drive. A truly passive setup yielded temperatures above 40 degrees, where the P183 was able to keep hard drive temperature at an impressive 30 degrees. You’ll see how adding a fan in the lower chamber can further improve things shortly as well.


We saw some truly exceptional PSU temperature readings from the P183. They seemed almost too good to be true. At idle, we were getting measurements only a fraction of a degree above ambient, and an impressive 31 degrees with almost 350 watts being measured at the socket with the system at full load. About the only way we can make sense of this is the exceptional separation between the warm upper section of the case, and the cooler lower chamber. After rerunning the PSU test several times, and even changing the batteries in the external probe we were using, we got consistently good results. Antec’s implementation of the chamber system proves to be very effective in this regard.