The interior of the P180 is designed with separate chambers for your PSU and hard drives (bottom section) and motherboard optical drives etc. (top section) This is done to separate the two highest heat generating components (PSU and HDD) from the rest of your hardware.

We will be taking as look at each section one at a time starting with the lower. The lower section is where your PSU and up to 4 HDD's are located. The PSU is mounted using a removable bracket, basically the PSU sits on a stand, and the bracket is placed over it and in essence clamps the PSU in place. The bracket is designed so that the PSU can be turned facing up or down. There is a whole in the top of the bracket that allows for a 120mm fan, and on the bottom the PSU is elevated off the case bottom so air can be exhausted out of the PSU via the fan if you wish to install the PSU with the fan down. The stand the PSU sits on as well as the hold down bracket have rubber strips between themselves and the PSU to further reduce vibration noise.

At the front of the lower chamber is a removable hard drive cage. This cage holds 4 drives in a vertical position. To remove the cage you have to remove a thumbscrew and then simply pull the cage out using the ring (the ring locks down when not needed, preventing any vibration noise from it hitting against the cage) The HDD's are secured by long screws and also insulated with rubber bushings both between the drive and the cage on the inside, and the screw head and the cage on the outside.

Between the PSU mount and the HDD cage is a 120mm fan to aid in pulling cool air through the front of the case, across the drives and onto the PSU. This is also where I ran into my first issue with the P180. There is about an inch and a half of space between the fan and the HDD cage, so you have to be very careful when plugging in your drives that there are no cables hitting the fan and preventing it from spinning.

Separating the two chambers is a two piece sliding door, two doors actually. On one side (towards the back of the case) is where you run all your wiring from the PSU to your devices, ATX plug, molex etc. The other door, towards the front of the case is where the cables from your HDD's go through to connect to your motherboard. This door helps further isolate heat produced by the PSU and hard drives. It is also where I ran into my second problem with this design. There is no cutout on the piece that the 120mm fan that sits between the PSU and the HDD cage to allow the cables that supply power to the HDD's to pass through, so the leads from the PSU have to be threaded up into the main motherboard area through the rear opening, and then back down into the front door. There is however a VERY small space that you can squeeze the leads into as long as they are not sleeved. This could be easily fixed with a cutout though and would solve the issue 100%. You can see in the third picture how I managed to route the wires.

On to the top chamber. Other than the motherboard mounting higher in the case there isn't much to talk about here, so I'll focus on the 2nd drive cage. Just above the lower drive cage in the upper chamber is a second drive cage with room for 2 more drives. Unlike the lower cage the drives mount horizontally on slide out trays. These mounts also use rubber bushings to dampen vibration.

As an added bonus, on the backside of this cage you'll find a small "toolbox" just right for keeping extra screws and things in. If you don't want to pull the HDD cage to get to the box, it is accessible by removing the side panel.

At the beginning of the review I mentioned the absence of the duct that attached to cool you GPU that was included with the silver P180. Antec replaced the cooling duct by making it so that the upper HDD cage can be used as a cooling duct. There are a couple of options. If you have drives installed in this cage there is a bracket for mounting a 120mm fan to cool the drives. Forgive the dirty fan, Antec includes three fans with the case so I had to dig one up out of my spare parts for this.

If you will not be using the cage for drives Antec provides two clips for attaching the fan to the drive cage, this pulls air in through the front of the case, through the cage that acts as a duct and forces cooler outside air directly onto the video card or cards.(I realize the fan is backwards in the pictures, I did turn it around afterwards :) )

The Optical drives use the rail system everyone is familiar with. Rails attach to the drives with screws and the drives slide in and snap into place. Installation wise a new system build in this case is just a tad more tedious than in any other case I have worked with. The two chamber system makes wire management much more difficult so if you are one of those that likes to hide all your internal wires and likes a challenge this is definitely the case for you. Another thing to consider is wire length, due to the PSU being on the bottom and most power connectors (ATX, AUX, etc.) are normally placed near the top edge of the board. You will want to make sure the wiring on your PSU is long enough. As you can see in the pic below, wire management isn't my strong point.

On to performance.

NEXT