Antec Minuet 300

Life is a game of compromise. Here's a box of compromise.

The Minuet 300 is undeniably small. The interior offers extremely limited space to work in – the case is only capable of housing micro-ATX form factor motherboards and half-height expansion cards.

The fascia appears to be a miniaturisation of the Antec Overture II case. It offers a very clean, non-reflective silver surface surrounded by a reflective, chrome-like bezel that frames the front. As the case is obviously designed for HTPC activities, we were rather perplexed as to why the front media ports were not covered, or placed on the side of the case.

The cooling provided is fairly simplified, with only a single 80mm fan mounted to the side of the case, a fan within the PSU and ventilation holes at the rear and above the CPU socket. The drive space available in this system is scarce at best, with one of each generally expected drive bay type included. Thankfully, the caddy that holds these bays can be easily removed from the rest of the enclosure, allowing easy access to the otherwise near-impossible to access internal 3.5" drive bay.

The Minuet 300 has a rather appealing look. The case incorporates multiple shades of silver on the fascia, contrasted with a highly reflective, piano-black set of side panels.

This case is obviously tailored towards the HTPC market and thus there are multiple restrictions on hardware use. It can’t incorporate ATX motherboards, ATX specification power supplies, full-height expansion cards and multiple storage devices. Surprisingly, the Minuet 300 is quite heavy at more then two-thirds of the weight of the SLK1650B, despite being only one-third the size.

Conveniently incorporated is a 300W PSU, which offers a 24-pin ATX plug, a 4-pin connection, two standard 4-pin drive connections, one floppy connection and one SATA connection. The PSU is sufficient for this enclosure – if you were to integrate enough hardware to push the system over the 300W barrier, the Minuet 300 really wouldn’t be the case for you.

It’s a neat little package but lacks the versatility of full ATX enclosures.