A Closer Look - Inside

To gain access to the interior, simply remove the thumb screw holding each panel in place. The entire interior is black as well and everything is where you would expect to find it. Interestingly enough, there are no screw-less systems on any of the drive bays and Antec ships a very limited number of screws with the case. Looks like they have devised a system that does not require any rails or screws. There are plenty of openings in the mainboard tray, with the largest one giving you easy access to any CPU cooler backplate.


Antec has placed a large plastic sliding lock in the front of the chassis. This is for the three front doors, so that nobody can open your case and pull out any drives. There is nothing special about the three external drive bays, but as you can see, four of the nine hard drive bays have PCBs attached to a plastic contraption. So the top two and bottom two bays are hot-swappable. You are free to rearrange these if you wish. I am not aware of Antec offering additional ones and their website does not list them as accessories either.


Turning our focus toward the rear, four large rubber bumps are used to rest the PSU on. Each of the seven mainboard expansion slots are held in place by traditional screws. While it would have been nice to see thumb screws here, normal ones are still better than some mediocre plastic solution. The very top holds the two 120 mm exhaust fans. They draw power from Molex connectors, but their speed is controlled through the little device in the rear of the case. This means that you won't be able to replace them without loosing the ability to manually control them.


Taking a quick look at the two 140 mm ceiling fans, these push air out the top of the chassis as well. Due to the many fans, there is bound to be excellent air flow throughout the DF-85.


Before diving into assembly, let us take a look at the cables and connectors. The external 2.5 inch bay is simply routed to the interior with the traditional means of a Molex and SATA data cable, while all the other cables are of the usual variety. Antec has chosen to keep the USB 3.0 cable black as well instead of using the standard blue color.