Antec Fusion Black 430 Review

Interior

In order to get into the Antec Fusion Black 430 you have to release one single thumbscrew on the back of the case.

In this picture you can see that the interior has three independent zones, one for the motherboard area, a second one for the hard disk drives and a third for the PSU/DVD drive area. The reason for this is to achieve the best thermal transfer possible for the vital parts of the system. A rather appealing aspect of this case is that it will only house mATX motherboards. (9.6" x 9.6")

Here is a shot of the dual Antec tri-cool fans, as we mentioned earlier this is a welcome sight in this kind of a case. The advantage of using 120mm fans over 92mm, 82mm or even 60mm fans is pretty self explanatory.

Here the 5.25” bay can be seen where the DVD drive of your choice will be installed.

And a shot with the bay taken out (which was very easy to do), no tools were needed, just unhook it from a bayonet style mount and you’re done. There is only room for one 5.25” unit in this particular case, the second slot is occupied by the LCD display in the front.

Here is the Power Supply Unit shipped with the Antec Fusion Black 430, as the 430 section of the name indicates it is a 430w PSU. The PSU model used in this case is meant to power a SLI or Crossfire setup but to cope with a decent media computer. It has two 12v rails sporting 16A each and 25A on both the +5 and +3.3V; we won’t go in depth on the performance of this power supply unit at this time but I can say that it did not show any signs of instability at any time during this review with our hardware, all the rails were well within tolerances.

Now lets move on to the third zone of the Fusion; the HDD compartment. This zone is able to take up to two hard disk drives which should be enough for most media pc’s today considering the ever growing capacity of drives.

In order to install the hard disk drives you have to release four screws in each corner of the bracket, and then just lift it up.

The HDD compartment has four clamps with rubber strips glued to them to prevent excessive vibrations and help with securing the drives. The compartment also has the silicon cushions we’ve gotten accustomed to see in Antec enclosures. Another section of ventilation holes help keep the HDDs cool.

Similar to the Antec P180 with its chamber design there is an adjustable “hatch” between the motherboard and PSU/DVD compartments allowing the necessary cables to be routed through.

Above the I/0 shield there is another air intake to help keep the system cool, there is also an adjustable duct to help direct fresh air to the CPU cooler.

The duct is made of three parts of plastic that can be adjusted simply by adding or removing parts from it.

When you have decided what length is best for your system just push the duct into place and you’re done. I’m not convinced that it will make any considerable difference to cooling, we didn’t notice any difference with it on or off during the testing.