Twelve Hundred
Antec's PR was in full swing yesterday and HEXUS was invited over to see four new products that will be making their way into mass production shortly.
Our gaze was immediately directed towards the behemoth that Antec calls the Twelve Hundred, which is the bigger brother of the Nine Hundred we reviewed last year. The name pretty much gives the game away, as the Twelve Hundred packs in 12 bays, with three modular cages offering a total of nine 3.5in drives to be mounted. What you can't see are the three (dust-filtered) 120mm intake fans directly in front of the cages, and we're told that mass-production Twelve Hundreds will feature bezel-mounted knobs to manually adjust the respective fans' speed from 1,000RPM to 2,000RPM.
The standout feature with respect to front-mounted connectivity is the provision of an eSATA port.
Looking at the Twelve Hundred from a side-on angle shows the same 200mm fan that we saw on its smaller brother.
There's space for a couple of 120mm exhaust fans as well as holes for routing an external water-cooling kit. Antec was rather coy when asked whether a Twelve Hundred with pre-attached water-cooling would be made available, so we took that as a yes!.
It's big, bold, can house an eATX motherboard, and will cost around £89 when it finally goes on sale. Antec's added dust filters and newer connectivity support, but we still don't like the way in which four screws have to be removed to access the modular bays, though.
