A Detailed Look – At the Inside
The interior of the DF-30 is pretty standard, and I was a little disappointed that Antec didn’t include any tool-less features for the optical bays, hard drive bays, and PCI slots. I know they had to make some compromises to keep the price point down on this case, but tool-less installation features are very common and have become a common practice in today’s PC enclosure market.
Antec included a 140mm fan on the top of the case and a standard 120mm fan on the back panel of the DF-30. I like how these fans match the paint scheme of the case and the RPMs can be adjusted by two switches located on the back panel of the chassis. The 120mm fan also has blue LEDs to give the case a little more color that should appeal to a wide variety of PC builders.
The interior layout has enough real estate for a variety of motherboard form factors including mini ITX, micro ATX, and ATX motherboards. The motherboard tray is not removable, but each standoff is labeled to let users know which form factor they support. The power supply mounts to the bottom of the DF-30 and the PCI slots are painted black, but not designed to be used without screws.
The DF-30 supports three 5.25″ optical drives and six 3.5″ hard drives. I appreciate the two 120mm fans Antec mounted to the front panel of this case, but none of the bays include rubber grommets or other sound vibration material. They also didn’t include any tool-less options, but I think I’ve harped on that enough times already in this review. On a more positive note, this case does support one 2.5″ SSD at the bottom of the case. The ironic aspect of this feature is that Antec included rubber grommets for users installing an SSD to the bottom of the case. However, most enthusiasts know that SSDs do not have any parts that require materials to reduce vibration from a solid state drive because they are not designed like typical platter-based hard drives.
Antec included two more 120mm blue LED fans that can be accessed through two doors on the front panel. They also included two fan controllers that can be accessed from the front of the case. I won’t mention what is missing from the hard drive bays again…
Lastly, I just wanted to show a close-up shot of the hard drive bay with Antec’s embossed logo. I still wish we had some tool-less options and sound dampening materials, but that is difficult to add when you are trying to keep an enclosure in the $90-$100 price range.
