Antec Take 4 Studio Series Rackmount Case Review

Lastly lets take a look at the accessories that come with this chassis.  The standard included item you normally see are the power cord (nice beefy one), screws with stand offs, speaker, keys and manual.  Some nice add-ons that I don't normally see included are the cable management clamps in the bag, zip ties with stick on mounts, motherboard gasket, rubber pads (feet) and a 4 pin motherboard power extension. 

Features:

• Drive Bays:
  2 external 5.25” bay
  2 external, 4 internal 3.5” bay
• 450W ATX12V v2.0 Power Supply
• Rubber grommets to absorb hard drive vibration.
• Power supply is isolated from the system to keep the system cooler.
• Front ports:
  2 x USB2.0,
  1 x Firewire (IEEE1394)
• Cooling system:
  1 x 120mm TriCool
  1 x 92mm TriCool

Specifications:

The Install:

     Looking at the hard drive cages, they come out by unscrewing the two thumb screws on the front to reveal another feature to reduce noise.  They all have shock mounts with the special screws etc. so hard drive vibration doesn't get amplified by the chassis.  Very nice!

With a decent 250 GB Western Digital drive installed, everything looks very clean and professional.

After removing 6 screws the 5.25" drive cage comes right out, no muss, no fuss.

     I installed a ECS NForce3-A ver. 1.0A motherboard with a 3100 Sempron processor using a Arctic Cooling Silencer heat sink and fan.  Rounding out the build was 1 gig of Kingston PC3200 value ram,  a NVidia 5200 AGP video card, PCI wireless g NIC card and a DVD-Rom.  Nothing extra special, but for my HTPC build up it will perform the job quite well.  The board is not a full sized ATX form factor, however it does show you how much room you do have to work with, which is ample.  Installing the board requires you to remove the stiffening rod.  You will also need to remove the 120mm cooling fan to install the motherboard gasket.  A small price to pay for some serious quiet cooling.

     Here's what the front looks like with the DVD and hard drives installed.  Clean and professional all the way.  Notice there is still ample of room for 3 more hard drives which can make this a wicked DVR, MP3 and file server all rolled into one.

Conclusion:

     From the first look I knew this chassis was well built, with tons of drive capacity.  What I didn't expect was the degree to which the cooling was engineered to be effective as well as quiet.  Building a home entertainment HTPC or if you are a recording artist, this chassis would be a great start to building the AV server of your dreams.  I didn't find a single thing I didn't like about this chassis, every attention to detail was made.  Thanks Jim for the great work, Antec does it again!