Antec LifeStyle SOLO (0761345-18500-4) ATX Mini-Tower Case

My inital impression was that this case was a well designed product, one with several high end features not often found on many other cases.  These features include a removable dust filter (though plastic and somewhat fragile), sound deadening material on both side doors, two front panel 92mm fans positioned to cool the hard drive bay area, a rear 120mm exhaust fan, etc.  The case is available in two configurations.  One ships with an Antec power supply and is often sold in pearlescent white color (to many, a strikingly handsome case); another version is sold without a power supply and has a silver/black color scheme.

One important issue is weight.  These cases are all thick gauge steel and are VERY heavy.  This helps to deaden sound transmission through the case walls so, along with the plastic deadening material laminated to each door, the case is relatively quiet.  On the other hand, moving a fully configured computer using this case is a royal pain due to its weight.  Therefore this case's weight is either a good or bad feature -- your call.

So far the case sounds like a nice product, but it has a bad flaw (from my point of view, a FATAL one).  For some inexplicable reason Antec decided to design both the power and reset push buttons using ALL plastic components.  Front panel push buttons usually use coil springs made of steel, but the ones in this case are 100% plastic.  Though hard to describe, each button has a thin plastic piece formed into a fragile semicircular shape held in place with melted plastic rivets.  The main plastic piece is expected to act as a spring by bending sort of like a torsion bar.  This works for a short while, but often only for a week or so.  Once a plastic "spring" cracks, there's virtually no way to repair it.  If you want the problem fixed, you must buy another complete front panel assembly from Antec.

Antec tech support has said that they are aware of the problem and that the company has tried to improve the design.  But instead of returning to rugged steel, all they did was to add another piece of plastic which was hoped to act as a travel limiter, something to keep users from pushing the buttons too far or too hard.  So far the newer model cases I've inspected show that this new limiter often breaks, shortly followed by breakage of the main "spring" it was meant to protect.  It isn't a real fix.

Plastic may be a fine material for some applications, but in this case it does very poorly as a spring.  I had hoped that Antec would bring out a third design for the front panel, but as far as I know they haven't done this.  Worse, while looking at other Antec cases recently, I discovered they've begun using plastic springs in some of their other models.  Let's hope they reevaluate this poor design decision.