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Antec Skeleton Open-Air PC Case Review
By Jason Cross
Antec Skeleton Open-Air PC Case Slideshow
All Slides
We see lots of PC enclosures aimed at a particular niche: thin and quiet home theater PC cases made to fit into A/V racks, little cube PCs with handles to take to the LAN party, towering wind tunnels with lots of room for extreme overclockers with their high-end gear—you name it. Seldom have we seen a case so obviously and aggressively designed explicitly for a very narrow market segment as with the new Skeleton from Antec.
If you look at your PC enclosure and think, "you know, there's just too much enclosure there," Antec has a case for you. If you read that and laughed, you're not the target market. If you read that and said, "finally!" you'll be happy with what these venerable case designers have come up with.
The Skeleton is less a case or enclosure for your PC and more of a rack. An open rack. A rack meant to mimic open test beds, only with a little more structural integrity. It's a framework built to securely hold all your PC components out in the open.
The target market is the kind of PC builder who leaves the doors off the side of his case, pops off the front door covering the optical drives, and wouldn't have it any other way. It's certainly unique—so much so that it's hard to pin a "good" or "bad" label on it. Odds are, you'll see it and either know you have to have it, or wonder why anyone would ever want something like this.
The basic premise of the Skeleton is this: It's a flat open "shelf" for your motherboard, much like a test bed, with the power supply and drives sitting on shelves underneath and a huge 250mm fan above, held up by arching arms.
On the front arm of the case you'll find the usual assortment of buttons and ports. Power, reset, two USB ports, one eSATA port, FireWire, and headphone/mic jacks.
From behind, a clear plastic arm provides stability for add-in cards, with brass screw holes to screw down those graphics, sound, or networking cards. Depending on the size of your add-in card, you may have to unscrew and remove this arm, then replace it after you plug in the card.
Above, the huge 250mm fan is controlled by a three-speed switch, and is extremely quiet at the lowest setting. A pushbutton by the switch alternates the fan's three colored LEDs; press once and it lights up blue, again for green, again for red. Then it cycles through mixed colors—blue/green, green/red, blue/red, and blue/green/red.
It takes a lot of button presses to finally loop around to turning the fan "off" but we have to admit that the really large fan blades do make for some cool geometric patterns in the light. The size of this fan, its close proximity to the motherboard, and the fact that it covers most of your system's slots, the RAM, and CPU, makes this open-air case an excellent cooler. At the lowest speed setting we could barely hear the fan at all, but it clearly moved a massive amount of air over all our components.
You'd think building a PC into such an open case would be easy, but it actually requires a bit more work than you'd think. You'll want to pull off the side panels (they pop off by pulling two easy levers) to get started.
Lift a lever to slide out the power supply tray, screw your power supply in, and slide the tray back. If your power supply has a lot of power cables, it can be tough to route them all in a way that doesn't interfere with your drives and reaches all your components up above, so this seemingly easy step can be one of the most frustrating.
Drives slide in up front, and screw in from the sides. There's room for two 3.5-inch hard drives and two 5.25-inch optical drives. Shown below is an optional clip-on fan to blow air over the hard drives, which we all know can get a little hot. Since the drives are located beneath the motherboard tray, they don't really get the benefit of the huge 250mm top fan.
The case also comes with four small brackets you can screw onto additional hard drives and sort of "hang" them on the side.
Of course, the final major step is to install the motherboard itself. The power supply and drives are the hard part—installing a motherboard is easier on the Skeleton than on perhaps any other case we've used.
First, just unscrew a couple of thumb screws in the rear of the unit by the power supply.
Then, the whole bottom tray slides out the back—power supply, drives, and all. Again, you might want to remove the clear plastic card securing rail to give yourself a little more working room, but building out a motherboard and plugging in cables here is about as close as you'll ever get to simply building up a PC outside of a case entirely.
The end result is a system that, once it is built up, is pretty easy to work on. A couple of thumb screws and a tug of the tray give you wide-open access to the entire motherboard and everything on it. The one catch is the plastic card retention bar—if your graphics card is fairly small, you can slide it in sideways and plug it in without removing the bar. Otherwise, you'll be unscrewing that bar every time you want to pull the tray out. Getting to the plugs in the back of your optical and hard drives can be a bit of a hassle, too, though it's extremely easy to actually pull out those drives when needed.
Obviously, dust and pet hair would be an issue with a case like this. It's completely wide open with a large fan moving lots of air down, with no filtration. The bad news is that this could mean lots of dust or pet hair on your PC. The good news is that it's very easy to clean off: a quick spritz with a compressed air can blow dust off of every nook, cranny, and component much more easily than if they were in a typical PC case.
The Skeleton carries a list price of about $189 with no power supply, though we regularly see it online in the $150–160 range. That's a bit steep, but this is a bit of a specialty item made for a narrow market segment. Is it a good case? It's a matter of perspective. For the regular user, even power-user, it is not. Better to protect your components and shield yourself from their noise with a good mid-tower or something.
But this isn't a case for those regular users. No, this case is for the kind of power user that leaves their case open all the time anyway, wants to show off his components, and constantly fiddles around swapping out parts. Even for that select group there are a few niggling concerns, but we can safely say that there's nothing else like it.
By Jason Cross
Antec Skeleton Open-Air PC Case Slideshow
All Slides
We see lots of PC enclosures aimed at a particular niche: thin and quiet home theater PC cases made to fit into A/V racks, little cube PCs with handles to take to the LAN party, towering wind tunnels with lots of room for extreme overclockers with their high-end gear—you name it. Seldom have we seen a case so obviously and aggressively designed explicitly for a very narrow market segment as with the new Skeleton from Antec.
If you look at your PC enclosure and think, "you know, there's just too much enclosure there," Antec has a case for you. If you read that and laughed, you're not the target market. If you read that and said, "finally!" you'll be happy with what these venerable case designers have come up with.
The Skeleton is less a case or enclosure for your PC and more of a rack. An open rack. A rack meant to mimic open test beds, only with a little more structural integrity. It's a framework built to securely hold all your PC components out in the open.
The target market is the kind of PC builder who leaves the doors off the side of his case, pops off the front door covering the optical drives, and wouldn't have it any other way. It's certainly unique—so much so that it's hard to pin a "good" or "bad" label on it. Odds are, you'll see it and either know you have to have it, or wonder why anyone would ever want something like this.
The basic premise of the Skeleton is this: It's a flat open "shelf" for your motherboard, much like a test bed, with the power supply and drives sitting on shelves underneath and a huge 250mm fan above, held up by arching arms.
On the front arm of the case you'll find the usual assortment of buttons and ports. Power, reset, two USB ports, one eSATA port, FireWire, and headphone/mic jacks.
From behind, a clear plastic arm provides stability for add-in cards, with brass screw holes to screw down those graphics, sound, or networking cards. Depending on the size of your add-in card, you may have to unscrew and remove this arm, then replace it after you plug in the card.
Above, the huge 250mm fan is controlled by a three-speed switch, and is extremely quiet at the lowest setting. A pushbutton by the switch alternates the fan's three colored LEDs; press once and it lights up blue, again for green, again for red. Then it cycles through mixed colors—blue/green, green/red, blue/red, and blue/green/red.
It takes a lot of button presses to finally loop around to turning the fan "off" but we have to admit that the really large fan blades do make for some cool geometric patterns in the light. The size of this fan, its close proximity to the motherboard, and the fact that it covers most of your system's slots, the RAM, and CPU, makes this open-air case an excellent cooler. At the lowest speed setting we could barely hear the fan at all, but it clearly moved a massive amount of air over all our components.
You'd think building a PC into such an open case would be easy, but it actually requires a bit more work than you'd think. You'll want to pull off the side panels (they pop off by pulling two easy levers) to get started.
Lift a lever to slide out the power supply tray, screw your power supply in, and slide the tray back. If your power supply has a lot of power cables, it can be tough to route them all in a way that doesn't interfere with your drives and reaches all your components up above, so this seemingly easy step can be one of the most frustrating.
Drives slide in up front, and screw in from the sides. There's room for two 3.5-inch hard drives and two 5.25-inch optical drives. Shown below is an optional clip-on fan to blow air over the hard drives, which we all know can get a little hot. Since the drives are located beneath the motherboard tray, they don't really get the benefit of the huge 250mm top fan.
The case also comes with four small brackets you can screw onto additional hard drives and sort of "hang" them on the side.
Of course, the final major step is to install the motherboard itself. The power supply and drives are the hard part—installing a motherboard is easier on the Skeleton than on perhaps any other case we've used.
First, just unscrew a couple of thumb screws in the rear of the unit by the power supply.
Then, the whole bottom tray slides out the back—power supply, drives, and all. Again, you might want to remove the clear plastic card securing rail to give yourself a little more working room, but building out a motherboard and plugging in cables here is about as close as you'll ever get to simply building up a PC outside of a case entirely.
The end result is a system that, once it is built up, is pretty easy to work on. A couple of thumb screws and a tug of the tray give you wide-open access to the entire motherboard and everything on it. The one catch is the plastic card retention bar—if your graphics card is fairly small, you can slide it in sideways and plug it in without removing the bar. Otherwise, you'll be unscrewing that bar every time you want to pull the tray out. Getting to the plugs in the back of your optical and hard drives can be a bit of a hassle, too, though it's extremely easy to actually pull out those drives when needed.
Obviously, dust and pet hair would be an issue with a case like this. It's completely wide open with a large fan moving lots of air down, with no filtration. The bad news is that this could mean lots of dust or pet hair on your PC. The good news is that it's very easy to clean off: a quick spritz with a compressed air can blow dust off of every nook, cranny, and component much more easily than if they were in a typical PC case.
The Skeleton carries a list price of about $189 with no power supply, though we regularly see it online in the $150–160 range. That's a bit steep, but this is a bit of a specialty item made for a narrow market segment. Is it a good case? It's a matter of perspective. For the regular user, even power-user, it is not. Better to protect your components and shield yourself from their noise with a good mid-tower or something.
But this isn't a case for those regular users. No, this case is for the kind of power user that leaves their case open all the time anyway, wants to show off his components, and constantly fiddles around swapping out parts. Even for that select group there are a few niggling concerns, but we can safely say that there's nothing else like it.
