Antec One S3 Mid Tower Chassis Review

1. Introduction
2. Packaging and Specification
3. External Impressions
4. Internal Impression Part 1
5. Internal Impression Part 2
6. Test Bench and Installation Experience
7. Conclusion

It gives me great pleasure that companies such as Asus, Gigabyte, Kingston, Western Digital and Coolermaster who give me hardware support by updating my test rig no strings attached. Its because of these guys that I get to test only only their hardware but also from others. Thumbs up to these guys!

I would like to thank

• Gigabyte India for providing Gigabyte 890GPA UD3H Rev 1.0 motherboard
• Asus India for providing Asus 990FX Sabertooth motherboard
• Kingston Taiwan for providing hardware support with memory kits and SSD drive.
• WD India for providing WD 300GB HLFS Velociraptor Hard Drive.
• Coolermaster India for providing Coolermaster GX450 RS-450-ACAA-D3 Power Supply

Since there is a support below the PCIE slot that is riveted to the motherboard tray as well, I needed to slide it a bit, but when you do that it does removes the glued feet for the power supply.

I maybe doing a lot of nit-picking for a low-cost case but the HDD slide does lack washers.

There is little bit of an inconvenience when installing the 8 Pin EPS cable. The layout of the board is little bit different when it comes EPS placement, but there are manufacturers who move couple of connectors a little bit to the right- like how Asus did. But as you can see, with the top fan installed, its not possible to clip on the power cable. That fan ought to stay at the Rear I/O. Period.

The HD Audio can stretch out easily as long as the board’s onboard audio connector is on the lower side of the motherboard’s PCB. But if you happen to have a motherboard where they still put the Audio header to the left of the PCIE slot- or even if you use your sound card with the front panel audio connector- and its not on the bottom PCIE slot of the board- you’ll have to route the cable through one of the cable management hole and maybe- depending on the sound card’s layout- it could connect.

The SSD rail is on top and you can stack up 5 drives by max. The space on the the sides helps to reroute all the SATA power and connectors with ease.

Just like in CM Elite 311 Plus, its not possible for me to secure the right sidepanel with most of the cables being routed behind especially the thick 24pin cable.

Asus HD 7850 Direct CUII is a dual slot card with the length of 10.5” including the cooler. I was able to route the cable easily only because the length of the PCB was roughly 2/3rd of the card. But it was as long as 10.5" and depending where the PCIE power connector will be, its a tight squeeze.