News - SilverStone Fortress FT02 mixes Raven and FT01 internals. Looks promising

[HEXUS]

But out goes the all-aluminium interior.

Read more.

[Vadim]

Beautiful! Smartly designed aerodynamics and ability to access all the ports on top of the case puts it on my top list of cases for aircooled PCs.

[kalniel]

What you can't see from this angle is the ability to install a 2.5in drive on the far side

Huzzah!

Now we need a few others to follow suit, with a few more than one slot as well

[Queelis]

Excuse my ignorance, but what's that thing that is seemingly cooling the CPU?

[Salazaar]

That is one tasty looking case!

I'm still not sold on the idea of having all my conectors in the roof though.

[Infinite]

Looks like some sort of pipe cooler fill with some sort liquid that will evaporate or something and travel around the pipe.

Yeh anyways looks awesome, it is gonna be a long case.

[pollaxe]

I've long been a Silverstone fanboy and I like the look of this.. hmmm.... Was very nearly tempted to buy the Raven not so long ago.. wait, my precious.. yess.. we waits...

[aidanjt]

3 fans in, 1 fan out?.. Bit... odd.

[Salazaar]

Excuse my ignorance, but what's that thing that is seemingly cooling the CPU?

It's a Silentflux Passive Pro...

http://www.noiselimit.com/sw/fronten...79090&layout=0

[Arthran]

3 fans in, 1 fan out?.. Bit... odd.

as long as the top is grilled, the air should flow in the bottom and straight out anyway

[LuckyNV]

3 fans in, 1 fan out?.. Bit... odd.

more intake can be desirable from an anti-dust point of view, it almost guarantees that any air intake will be from the bottom and assuming it is dust filtered then much of it will be blocked.

Excess intake should be coupled with exhaust grills

[davidcrofter]

Wow that does look like a mighty fine case and looks one of the few new cases that look better that their forerunners ... certainly can't pick any faults with the design or spec on this beauty.

[CK_1985]

That is a properly nice bit of kit... I personally thought the Raven looked really messy internally but this seems to be much better implemented. I'm still on the lookout for my next case so that's another one to add to the list!

[vicx]

Curious that they undo the a lot of the good work of positive air pressure with the huge grill next to the card mounts. If you block up the grills, air is forced out between the video cards which helps cool components on the boards not directly attached to sinks but affected by the heat build up around the sink. With this much positive air pressure (3x180mm fans) the 120mm fan above the processor become redundant IMO.

Same size as my FT01 but this has much more efficient airflow.

[JohnAHind]

Very, very nice - Much better implementation of the convection maximising layout than the Raven IMHO. However it looks still to have two faults:

1. If you install 5.25" drives they will obstruct the vertical airflow through the hard drives. I do not know how to solve this one - optical drives present a huge horizontal plane which is going to obstruct air-flow in any vertical case layout. We need optical drives that can be vertically mounted - a return to slot rather than tray loading? However opticals are fortunately diminishing in importance these days.

2. The cables from the "backpanel" are still exiting at the top of the case - they ought to fit a cable duct at the back of the case to take these cables down to a floor-level exit. This would be easily arranged and is so obvious I cannot believe they have missed it on a second generation design. I sometimes wonder if case designers ever actually build computers in their cases!

[MD]

Not exactly true - to erradicate the issues of the HDD air flow they need to bring in a similar system to that on the TJ10, with the graphics card cooling zone, except rotated 90 degrees anti clockwise to extract the hot air from the HDD's upwards, drawing cool air from the floor of the chassis.

Doing so would make the internals of this chassis more 'zonal' and lead to controllable and quiet airflow in - it could be done at the expense of an optical drive for instance - I still cannot fathom why 4 5.25" is standard, even if you run a fan controller very few HAVE to use two optical drives...

the problem with the theory of running a duct on the rear of the chassis is an interesting one - cables just aren't long enough - many techys (like I used to be when I wrote the chassis reviews for HEXUS) use cherry or Dell keyboards and none of them ship with a long enough cable. The problem with the duct idea is that some products would be compatable and some not - for those who know PC's this is fine - but you have to remember the likes of silverstone work for the mass market.

This case isn't bad, but at the same time, chassis companies need to evolve what they have first, in the case of SS I beleive they move on too quickly, and don't let their excellent ideas mature into what they intended - me myself, after years of writing chassis reviews still to this day use an Akasa Eclipse 62, why? because it works, it does what it needs to and it does it without 'immature ideas' that were never fully developed by Akasa.

Case in point? They brought out the Mirage, it had a different door, why? Because thats all it needed.

I am also not too keen on lashing out £150 smackers on a steel/alu hybrid, to me thats a loss of direction and a compromise on the reasons for spending big money on a PC case nowadays.

M