Accessories and thermal performance
The accessories box appears pretty sparse but is, in fact, adequate. The only thing missing on this pre-production sample is a bay converter for a 3.5in drive, to let you use a 5.25 bay for a floppy disk drive or a memory-card reader. Antec assures us that a converter will be included when it starts shipping production versions of this chassis. The other accessories include a bag of the usual screws, some cable ties, a clear and concise manual and a PSU adapter plate. In addition, there's a fan bracket that fits into one of the drive caddies - assuming no HDDs are installed - to allow you to add yet another 120mm fan.
Thermal performance
We threw out our old hot 'n' toasty test rig a little while ago and replaced it with some new hardware that's more relevant to the current market.
Our selected motherboard is the copper-adorned ASUS P5K Deluxe. We switched our graphics card, too. Now, an ATI card powers our pixels. Below are the full specs of what we now put inside each chassis for testing.
| HEXUS chassis test equipment specification | |
|---|---|
| Motherboard | ASUS P5K Deluxe |
| Processor | Intel Core2Duo E6750 2.66GHz, 1333MHz FSB |
| Memory | 2GiB (2 x 1GiB) CellShock DDR2 PC8000 |
| Graphic card | HIS Digital 2900XT PCIe |
| Power supply | Corsair HX620W |
| Hard drive | Hitachi GST 250GB SATA x 2 |
| Optical drive | Pioneer 110 DVD rewriter |
During testing, the ambient temperature was a chilly 20.7 deg C.
After the system booted up, we let it idle for 15 minutes and then took some readings before putting everything through its paces.
We started off by running SiSoft Sandra Pro's burn-in tests - with ATITool running in the background to ensure that the CPU was going at full tilt.
Under load, the Antec 1200 managed to return a better performance than the recently-reviewed Cooler Master COSMOS S. CPU and GPU readings were both lower than with the COSMOS S, and the differential with case temperature was bigger still. However, the motherboard enjoyed the biggest improvement over Cooler Master's case, maxing out at only 31 deg C.
The testing carried out in our labs was with rear and top fans set to medium and the front fans set to 50 per cent on the dial.
Overall, the performance of the Antec 1200 was respectable and in line with that of its predecessor. We liked the flexibility of the fan controls; the only real disappointment was the noise when all fans were at their highest settings.