Antec LanBoy Air Review

Performance

Despite the LanBoy’s lack of side panels and the five 120mm intake fans, we were underwhelmed by its cooling. A CPU delta T of 55C with the fans at maximum speed, and of 58C with fans blowing at thier lowest setting as possible, is a poor result. This is likely the consequence of the lack of focused airflow through the case, as the meshed panels let air spill out via the path of least resistance, rather than through the heatsinks.

GPU temperatures were much better, but despite the direct airflow provided by the two 120mm fans blowing down onto the graphics card, we still didn’t see record-breaking measurements. A delta T of 41C is mediocre for graphics cooling in our experience.

While cooling wasn’t affected too much by dialling down the fans, noise levels dropped markedly. Like Antec’s previous cases, at full speed the fans were plainly audible even over the background hum of our lab, while dropping them to their lowest speed produced a pleasingly unintrusive low hum.

Conclusion

While the LanBoy Air is unique and displays Antec's usual high build quality, there’s a lot wrong with it. Making a PC with meshed exterior panels leads to a number of problems, while other design choices also cause concern.

The mesh exterior not only provides no protection for your hardware against dust, fluff and curious insects, but it doesn’t give the fans fitted to the LanBoy any focus for airflow, leading to poor cooling.

While the modular, reconfigurable interior is a neat addition on paper, it’s mostly pointless in practice. We see no need to move the PSU mount from the floor to the roof, and the removable motherboard tray was so tricky to actually remove we didn’t bother.

The numerous proprietary screws used to hold the LanBoy together are also annoying, while the wobbly AirMount HDD hard disk mounting system didn’t leave us convinced that our valuable data was stored safely. That the price is so high for all these flaws is incredible – at £150 we’d avoid the LanBoy, even if it was half the price, especially as you could bag an upgraded SilverStone Raven RV02 (which now ships with excellent Air Penetrator fans) for less money.

• Cooling
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• -
• 6/10

• Features
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• 7/10

• Design
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• -
• -
• 5/10

• Value
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• -
• -
• -
• -
• 3/10

• Overall
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• -
• -
• 5/10

Score Guide