Antec P183 Mid-Tower Case Review

Cooling Performance pg.2


As you can see, changing the fan speed can have a significant effect on CPU temperature. Reducing the fan speed increased temperatures around 3-4 degrees per increment. This is unfortunately the price you have to pay to enjoy silence in the P183.


GPU temperatures also take a bit of a dive for the worse with the fans on “Medium” or “Low”. About a five degree increase was observed on the hottest card when moving from “High” to “Low”. Since the HD3850s don’t exhaust directly out of the case, ample exhaust airflow from the case is critical to maintain reasonable temperatures.


Our next test involved installing fans in some of the optional mounting locations. When it comes to CPU temperature, adding an intake fan into the upper and lower chambers yielded a two degree decrease. Interestingly, installing the “Mid Fan” and the intake alone had little to no impact on CPU temperature. We actually measured a one degree increase in CPU temperature with only the upper intake fan installed.


When it comes to GPU cooling, we see a slight improvement provided by the installation of the “Mid Fan”, however we expected a more measurable improvement. Again, we saw the best results by installing intake fans in both the upper and lower chambers. For some odd reason, the single intake fan in the upper chamber actually increased the GPU temperature on GPU2. Although we can’t quite make sense out of why this would be, we can only assume that there are some thermodynamics at play here that are not obviously apparent.


And last but not least, we took a look at the impact of installing an intake fan in front of the hard drive cage in the lower chamber. We saw quite a significant seven degree decrease in hard drive temperatures with the Noctua NF-P12 installed. This quite literally makes the P183 the best performing case we’ve tested to date with respect to hard drive cooling.

For some odd reason though, PSU exhaust temperature actually increased slightly with the optional fan installed in the lower chamber. Again, we’re not quite sure why this would be, but the increased heat dissipation of the hard drive due to the active cooling may be a contributing factor in the warming of the PSU. We actually repeated this test several times to check for possible errors to no avail, and the fan speed of the PSU does not seem to increase during testing either. It is what it is, and this is a reproducible behaviour.