The power supply is a unique design, to take advantage of the space available. It’s a 300 watt unit with a single 12mm fan that handles all air flow for the chassis. Enough power connections to handle anything you could fill the Aria with.

Let’s get to the nitty gritty of building a system around the chassis. The sides and top come off easily and give quick access. Removed the drive cage and laid it aside for later use. There are a fair amount of cables in the unit when you include power and front connections, but they move aside easily. The motherboard has two screw mounts and the rest are standoffs with 90 degree hooks; to mount the motherboard you slide it in towards the rear of the case, hooking the board with the standoffs and then screwing it down in two spots. Very simple to use, but I had some wriggling to get the high end back of the motherboard under the power supply, as it just clears. There is enough space to add the CPU, heatsink and RAM after the motherboard is installed.

Running the cables from the front along the side to the motherboard connections for USB, Firewire, and the rest. I squeezed them between the motherboard and edge of the case to keep everything neat and tidy. Inserting a video card and sound card required removing two screws to take off the rear guard, then removing small screws that hold the slot covers in. Stripped one screw with minimal force, but only one of four. Connected power to the motherboard and moved the cable out of the airflow path. The optical drive mounted with standard screws, but six longer screws with rubber grommets are provided for the hard drive. Nice touch to reduce vibration, but could have used the same for the optical drive. It’s a bit of a stretch to get power connections onto the drives and then close the swinging drive cage, but Antec provides a rounded PATA cable for the optical drive and a SATA hard drive was used. Everything back together and powered up revealed blue lights on the front of the unit and a fairly quite operation. I may be spoiled by Antec’s other products, but the Aria sounded the same as the Sonata or SLK3700BQE.

If you’re looking for a small form factor case and want to build a system around a Micro ATX motherboard, your choices are limited. The Antec Aria is a solid choice for this criteria and deserves to be considered.

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Antec Aria provided courtesy of Antec.