Antec ISK 110 VESA Case Review: Just About As Small As It Gets
by Dustin Sklavos on August 31, 2012 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
- Mini ITX
- Antec
Introducing the Antec ISK 110 VESA
We've been having a good run of Mini-ITX cases lately, but most of those cases are designed to still be able to support what are essentially fully-powered systems: standard voltage CPUs, dedicated graphics cards, an optical drive and multiple storage drives. Yet part of the charm of Mini-ITX is that it's capable of fitting into a much smaller space than even a Micro-ATX board theoretically could. If you're gunning just to produce a system that's very small and very efficient, but you don't want to just use someone else's build, a Mini-ITX board and the right enclosure can have you covered.
That's where the Antec ISK 110 VESA comes in. This case is about as small as it gets, and includes the necessary hardware to actually mount it to the back of a monitor. Antec has trimmed about as much fat as you could conceivably hope to trim; there's enough room for a Mini-ITX board, two 2.5" drives, and that's it. It includes an external 90-watt power supply and just enough internal power circuitry to drive low-to-moderate power hardware. With so little room to work in, did Antec make the right decisions, or was there still more they could do?
A few months back we were able to review two complete designs from Puget Systems that employed the ISK 110 VESA, and those systems proved you could still install a formidable machine in the tiny space. Yet there are very real limitations in getting a desktop this small, as well as certain trade-offs that Antec made. Just because there isn't much to pack in the ISK 110 VESA doesn't mean there isn't much to say about it or consider in its design; when you're drilling down this far, real choices have to be made.
Antec ISK 110 VESA Specifications | ||
Motherboard Form Factor | Mini-ITX | |
Drive Bays | External | - |
Internal | 2x 2.5" | |
Cooling | Front | - |
Rear | - | |
Top | - | |
Side | - | |
Bottom | - | |
Expansion Slots | - | |
I/O Port | 4x USB 2.0, 1x Headphone, 1x Mic | |
Power Supply Size | Included external 90W | |
Clearances | HSF | 40mm |
PSU | - | |
GPU | - | |
Dimensions |
8.7" x 3.1" x 8.4" 222mm x 78.6mm x 212mm |
|
Weight | 2.9 lbs / 1.3 kg | |
Special Features | External 90W 92% efficiency PSU | |
Price | $84 |
I wasn't kidding when I said this is about as barebones as it gets, but the price is reasonable at least considering you're getting a fairly specialized case, the necessary mounting brackets for placing it behind a monitor, and a power supply.
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CaptainDoug - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
Surely there's a place for 2 or 4 gb of ram...irqsRfun - Tuesday, November 20, 2012 - link
http://www.mini-box.com/M350-universal-mini-itx-en...This might be a better fit for some applications, since it does not require the purchase of a power supply.
powerarmour - Thursday, November 22, 2012 - link
Just built one of these myself :-http://img835.imageshack.us/img835/1981/img2012112...
Intel Core -3-3225 (w/HD 4000)
8GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3-1866
ASRock H77M-ITX motherboard
Found it very easy to install tbh, didn't have to take the power board out either, just slide the motherboard in back to front (angle towards front of case, lower, then slide up to the backplate)
No problems with cabling either, just look at the pic :)