 Welcome to my unboxing of a case that is not actually what it appears to be. So I wish I could show you guys the correct retail packaging for the Antec 302, but my sample arrived before they actually had, and I'm very sorry that this unboxing is a little late, but before they had a 302 box, or maybe it didn't. That was my assumption, but inside, so what they've done is they've double boxed it so that no one involved in the transportation process could have known that something so top secret was being shipped via courier and then opened it up to see the secrets inside. That's probably not how it went down. Okay, so the 302 is, as you may or may not be able to figure out on your own, an upgrade to the enormously successful Antec 300. If you've ever gone to a LAN event, what you've probably noticed is that other than Antec 900s and 300s, everything else is kind of like a few here and a few there. In those two, they are what you could label sort of the gamer's choice, because they especially at the time they were first introduced had great features, great build quality, and very reasonable price points. So the 302, actually I still need this for a second, the 302 is, aha, the 302 brings into the year 2012 everything that was good about the 300 before, including the value optimized price point, the excellent cooling options, and adds a few things that were maybe missing with the 300, given how old of a design that that one was. So I'm going to show you guys what Antec has to say for themselves before I get into the case myself. So up to 12.5 inches of expandability, maximum cooling, we'll cover that later, ease of use, so toolless 3.5 and 5.25 inch bays, front panel USB 3, that we'll get into more later, a washable PSU air filter and front intake filter, 8 expansion slots for up to XL ATX motherboards with 8 slots. So this particular one for example, the X79UD7 does have 8 slots, but ones like the Gigabyte Assassin for X58 have 9, so watch out for that. The XL ATX is not a real standard, okay, side cooling fan, cable routing holes behind the motherboard tray. Okay, let's have a look at the outside before we open this baby up. So for one thing, you can see the front has got a bit of a curved appearance to it, so don't worry, the bays are still straight, so you're going to have that very clean look, even if you install optical drives, you're not going to have, you know how some cases have like curved front bezels and then you install a flat optical drive and it looks kind of goofy because the rest of it's curved and there it looks out of place. So they haven't done that, they've just done a curved look on the side, looks very slick actually. Two USB 3.0 ports, microphone, headphones, reset switch is very hard to accidentally press, you can see, even if I push on it like this, I can't really press it, you got to get right in there and push it in order to reset your system. This is awesome because the last thing you want to do is accidentally reset your system with your knee while you're in the middle of a game. This is a gaming case after all, so they have to consider things like that. We've got our hard drive cages and that's pretty much it for the front. I mean the Antec 300 was a very classic looking case and they've gone that route again with the 300 too. Now this is interesting, more on this once we open up the case, but there's a 120mm cooling fan spot on the motherboard side of the inside of the case. So yes, yes, more on that later. Yes indeed. We have a 140mm cooling fan in the top as well as a couple of water cooling grommets, although most people probably won't use these, hey you never know, they could. If you did want to do an external water cooling setup, it's handy to not have to punch holes in your case or use those horrible PCI bracket pass-throughs that usually the tubing doesn't even fit properly through. So let's take the side panel off. Inside we find it does not have a black interior, although it's up to the individual user whether or not that matters. I've always thought it's a little bit silly to do a black interior on a case that doesn't have a window anyway, but to each his own. We should look at the back of the case before we wrap up here. So here are our 8 expansion slots, bottom mounted power supply, 120mm cooling fan as well as speed adjusters for both this 120mm fan and the 140mm fan in the top. These are two cool fans which means you have low and high RPM settings. On the inside of the case we find a number of things. So we find the power supply filter which actually, oh locks in place, okay that's kind of handy. There you go. So you can take that out, clean it off, put it back in and it comes out the side. This is a very smart design decision because when you're set up at your, okay here, I'm going to put this where it would be, so this would be next to my monitor and so I got all my cables coming out of the back of the system and my monitor is here and so many cases implement the fan filters back here. How am I going to reach this? My face is in my monitor now. I have to take my case, I have to hope that I don't pull on my cables too hard. If they put it on the side, all of a sudden it's much easier for me to get it out. All I have to do is take my case, angle it a little bit and I can get it out no problem. Back to the interior. So pretty much a no frills interior although they've done a nice big CPU cut out and now let's talk about this right here. So this is a 120mm cooling fan spot that's on the other side of the motherboard tray. Why? Why do I ask? Well check out this gaming motherboard. There are actual CPU VRM components on the back of the motherboard. That in addition to the fact that any modern motherboard has a ton of copper content in it so it's actually conducting a lot of heat away from the CPU just out here through the PCB itself. If you ever touch the back of a motherboard it's quite hot. That allows Antec 302 users to install an additional 120mm fan back there, use it as an exhaust and pull some of this heat away from the back of the motherboard. Alternately I guess you could use it as an intake and blow the air directly at the back of the motherboard if you want more of a positive air pressure thing going on in your case to keep dust out. Not really sure how I would do that. Since it's got filtered intakes I would probably use it as exhaust but I mean the choice is yours. So here are our three tool-less 5.25 inch bays and here are the mounting pieces for our six tool-less 3.5 inch bays. There's actually not a whole lot here in terms of frills and gimmicks so I'm not going to bother taking it out but you got your screws and your hard drive rails and oh actually okay I will take this out give me a sec. Well unfortunately they're not the same ones that were included with the 1100 so I'm not going to do the demo where I lift oh actually I guess I can. Okay I don't think they're the same ones but it's actually fairly secure so once you put these on all you do is slide your drive until it locks there's no screws involved whatsoever and it's pretty darn secure once it's in there. Another thing to note about Antec cases is even when they have a value case or a budget case or whatever it is you want to call it the build quality is always there and this is not always true of cases that might look flashier or have more features and this is just me Linus personally talking to you guys right now and I want to just I'm not going to name any names when I talk about their competitors but not all of Antec's competitors would have built the three and a half inch hard drive cage like this. See the way they have folded over the metal so that there's absolutely no chance of any kind of a rough edge not only does that improve the usability of the case by making it safer it also adds structural strength to it. The other thing they've done is this is just a design thing it's not like the metal is more expensive but the way they've done the cutouts here also gives this an enormous amount of strength. I have seen cases damaged in shipping to the point where this is bent so much that a hard drive slid in here would just fall right out or like go to the side because it doesn't even catch on these rails anymore but I really have never seen that with an Antec case so there you go guys. SSD mount we've got a two and a half inch SSD mount in the bottom personally I would prefer to have seen a tool-less three and a half inch mechanism that allows you to install more SSDs but it's not the end of the world and it looks like we've got another SSD mount on the other side of the motherboard tray so you can put that one hiding this one I like I like hiding SSDs behind the motherboard that's awesome. So what else we got here oh let's look at the front fan filter I haven't even shown that yet so there's a couple clips here on the front I'm gonna go ahead and pull that off so the front fan filter is yes there we go comes off somehow oh there we go so it's just these little clips right here and you pull it out like but there we go so that can be cleaned fairly quickly fairly easily pop that back in place once I figure out how to do it that's actually quite quick. Pop this back on oh these go into the hinge first there we go and I think that pretty much covers it is there anything I'm missing so we already covered the 12 and a half inch thing in the motherboard oh right the cable management on the back and Slick's gone ahead and turned it so that he can see it so he could remind me of something but I have a cheat sheet over there as well. Aha so there you go aha cable management so cable management is something where the 302 just blows away its predecessor look at this three centimeters of space on the back of the motherboard tray that means you can actually route a 24 pin cable without any hassle you've got one two three we could call that a cable management spot and I could potentially call that a cable management spot okay it's gonna be hard to count these but four major ones and then you can see they've got this extra room up here for your 8 pin right there and then they've also got a little one here for front audio or USB 3 or whatever else speaking of which the included cables are right here so it does have an internal USB 3 header for those two USB 3 front ports very high quality cable actually that's good to see and then hey look at this hey black and gray which happens to be the color scheme of the case power reset and front panel switches and there's our front panel audio so that's the kind of thing I would run through here in order to make it more more hidden also cable management spots on the back you can use the included zip ties to him there we go anchor your cables to these and then tie them up tight so that when you put the other side panel back on you don't have any trouble fitting it into place I think that pretty much wraps up the 300 to for me don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos and I do have one more thing to say check this out they thought of everything there's a vent right here so that means that whether you're doing intake or exhaust the air is actually going to have somewhere to go on that fan that's on the back of the motherboard tray yeah don't forget to subscribe.