In terms of cooling, the P280 has 3x 120mm exhaust fans one at the rear and two within the roof. All of these fans are plugged into a fan controller which is situated just above the rear exhaust fan, this allows the user to control the fans between low and high speed settings. In order to take advantage of this a Molex connector must be plugged into the fan controller from the PSU.
3x cooling fans within P280
Over on the other side there are 3 slots for optical drive storage within the 5.25 bay. Each slot has a tool-less design mechanism attached to it for the easy installation/removal of drives. The latch simply needs to be pulled/pushed.
Optical drive bay has tool-less design
Beneath this, within the HDD storage bay there are 6x trays for attaching 2.5 or 3.5 drives and an additional 2 slots have been implemented within the cage to allow 2.5 drives specifically. There are no intake fans behind this HDD cage but there is space to install 2x 120mm fans and there are also another 2 clips on the near side of the HDD bay for attaching 2x 120mm fans too.
Antecs decision to leave intake fans out of P280 is that according to them designing with better build quality over the amount of included cooling fans is paramount. Cooling fans can always be added in by the user, the quality is only implemented by the manufacturer.
Though this is a fair comment, it will be interesting to see how this case copes with thermal performance since it breaks out of positive, directional airflow design.
Lots of options for storing HDDs
With the tour over, on the next page we will install our test kit inside P280 and see what this case looks like with assembled components inside.