The
Antec Twelve Hundred is awesome, a very solid improvement over the Antec Nine Hundred. It doesn't meet all your criteria, though:
My needs:
- maxi/full tower, preferably long/deep and not super-tall
- possibility to add fans, or preferably a number of (3 or more) 120mm fans installed as standard
- as light as possible, 100% aluminium is cool
- no/as few as possible case LEDs, no flashing LEDs
- thumb-screws as standard
- good cooling for harddrives, side-mounted harddrive bay is cool and I would like that
The case comes with 6 installed Antec fans (3x 120mm front, 2x 120mm back, 1x 200mm top) with blue LEDs. The fan speed can be individually controlled from 1200 rpm to 2000 rpm (the 200mm top fan spins at 700 rpm at low settings). You can only switch off the LED of the top fan, which I did. The other LEDs don't bother me, though. You can also mount an additional 120mm in the side panel.
At 1200 rpm the 120mm fans are still too noise for my taste so I hooked them up to a fan controller and they're now spinning probably at like 800rpm - which is still plenty because the case is built like a sifter (with dust filters).
HDDs are mounted into drive cages that go into the 5.25" drive bays, of which there are 12, I think. I threw the drive cages out and mounted my 4 HDDs directly into the drive bays using
HDD decouplers. There was a problem getting the mounting brackets for the decouplers to fit without getting rid of the front fan but that was resolved by mounting them backwards and inserting the drive from the front, which makes the HDDs stick out of the drive bays a bit but it's no biggie. I mounted all drives either at the very top or the very bottom so the mainboard is fully exposed to two of the three front-mounted 120mm fans.
The case is slightly smaller than my old Chieftec Big Tower but it should still qualify as a full tower. There's plenty of room for cable management, including holes and room between the mainboard tray and the right side panel. There should be no problem with full-length video cards. Even internal water cooling should be no problem at all. There's plenty of room and no cross beams to get into the way (I really hate when I have to remove the mainboard just to get to the PSU).
The case uses thumb-screws for the side panels and the drive cages, the individual drivers and PCI-cards still have to be fixed with conventional screws.
The case is made of steel (and plastic) and quite heavy, which is one of the reasons I bought it. Fuck aluminuim cases, they're far too succeptible to HDD and fan vibrations. The heavier, the better, I rarely have to haul the thing around anyway.
The only thing I don't like is the fact that there is no front panel door to dampen DVD-Drive noise but then again, that would have probably clashed with the ZOMG RETARDEDLY GOOD COOLING WITHOUT HAVING TO RESORT TO SIDE PANEL FANS!!1 concept of the case.
The case isn't for ultra-sensitive silent-PC fanatics but if you lower the fan speed and decouple the HDDs it's still a reasonably quiet case.
The price may seem a bit hefty at €130 but since it comes with 6 half-decent fans that would cost ~ €70 if bought in retail it's not that bad, actually. I have to say I quite like the case. I would have bought the CoolerMaster Cosmos S or the Stacker 830 but they're €200 here and that's too steep for me. Since all three cases seem to be priced similarly in the US, you might want to get the Cosmos S, assuming that's where you live.
Here are some pictures. Sorry for all the dust, but I'm a pig. Also, I did a rather sloppy job with cable management. The flash light overexposed the dustfilters. The front actually looks... black with some tacky LED blue.
