The ITX case niche of the case industry has recently in the last 5 years been the Shining beacon for interesting design choices. Don’t get us wrong, ATX has seen some notable entries in the “You did WHAT now” category of case designs, but those are much further and farther betwen in releases and from a much smaller selection of manufacturers. Most notably, INWIN, Cougar, and most recently Antec. ITX however, truly pushes the envelope of what’s necessary to put in a computer and where it needs to be placed.
There seem to be two distinct camps when it comes to ITX case design. One side, small form factor or SFF crowd, is mainly concerned with size management and getting the entire system as small as possible. The other side, which doesn’t have a name as far as we know, is more interested in seeing what kinds of layouts are possible given the smaller components like the motherboard and PSU.
Antec has released the new Striker ITX case that it clearly in the second camp.
The open air chassis that is the Antec Striker does a number of things differently than most cases, but its most unique feature is front-mounting the GPU. That’s right, where most box style cases have front intake fans and glass, the Striker has a bracket to mount the GPU with connection terminals pointing down. And glass. In order to accomplish this, the motherboard is also rotated -90 degrees to have its I/O facing down and a riser cable is run between the two.
With this case being made up of separate planes with a series of bolts that holds the together, ala InWin H-Frame, there’s no top mounting for fans or radiators. That being said, there is still mounting for four 120mm fans or a pair 240mm radiators. One pair of fans and or a radiator is off the rear of the case, while the other set is behind the motherboard tray.
Also on the back side of the motherboard tray is a bracket that can hold two 2.5 inch SSDs. This tray also helps hide the wiring. The bottom quarter of the case is covered by two white shrouds that hide the PSU, Which is, of course, SFX.
Pricing for the Antec Striker is set at an eye-blnkingly-high $249 when it releases on October 14 of this year.