Hardware Silverstone Fortress FT01

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2008/10/20/silverstone-ft01-review/1

Behold and gaze upon the beauty of the Silverstone FT01! The affordable version of the iconic Silverstone TJ07 has arrived and we investigate to find out if the FT01 is just a pretty face or whether it's a knock out case at a bargain price. Read on to find out!

 

Looks very nice, a very worthy blank canvas. Personally I would rather have 120mm fans all round than the 180mm fans, they are easier to replace if they die. Plus it makes mounting a radiator easier.

 

IMO you could have should have tried to turn the top fan around to make it an exhaust? Might make some interesting changes to the results...

 

How about this: Reverse the top intake fan orientation to make it extract air from the case - will solve the problem of the single 120mm exhaust fan being too weak and allows to remove the top dust filter.

 

is it just me who thinks the looks of these cases are distinctely meh?

maybe it looks better in black but the silver looks tacky to me

 

£150 is a bargain case?

lol

 

For a Silverstone it is!

 

You can go to some eastern europe city for a weekend for that much dosh! Its crazy I tell Ye!

 

What a shame that they spoiled the ship for a ha'porth of tar... Although I too would have thought that exhausting out of the top fan might work better.. it would be interesting to know how that would affect that overall case performance.

 

I've spoken to several case manufacturers this morning about your claims--that use all of the various hard drive orientations--and none have said that this orientation is inferior in terms of cooling performance.

 

A HDD orientation like in the FT01 does have the advantage though that you can remove / add HDD's even with long graphicscards installed that would get in the way if the HDD's would be the other way.
Also aslong as they cut big enough holes in the hdd "box" cooling shoudnt be a issue.

150£ for a midi tower that doesnt even have a removable mobo tray? no thanks, as much as I love the external design, I'd rather pay 20£ more and get the best case ever (lian li a77) or save a big sum and just get a cm 690 instead.

 

I had very high hopes for this case.

Shame really since Silverstone do make great cases. Cooling is much worse than I expected however I really think as part of your testing that you should have reversed the top intake. Many other sites reversed the fan's whilst reviewing the TJ07/TJ09 and experienced vastly different results.

When are peoplegoing to stop harping on about the orientation of hard disks....STOP! Should a case manufacturer decide to invest $$$,$$$ on R&D and deem their design sufficient to pass Q&C then you should rest assured that all will be well. Lian-Li did it back with the V1000 series. How many Lian-Li cases do you see stuffed with HDD's??? I have a TJ09 with 5 HDD's and no failures. It really is not an issue so shut up about it!

Apart from my rant's, another nice review BT. This was going to be my new case but I guess I should wait a while, this is screaming at me for a Crysis/Far Cry 2 inspired mod......hmmmmm!

Do Coolermaster realize how much they would make with an updated Black Widow? Update should be front, rear and top 120mm mounts, 6 drive bay's instead of 4 to mount radiators if your so inclined and a top and bottom PSU mount....They would clean up with that design!

 

<- silverstone fanboi.

i love the looks of this case and a little downfall here n there that i can fix is not a deal-breaker.

and yes, looks like a great canvas. i prolly pick this one up for my girl....

 

The top fan needs to be in a plastic cradle, secured either by a push clip or two or maybe even a single screw that's easily reachable.

 

The orientation doesn't make a blind bit of difference, but I agree that the distance between drives certainly does.

 

Who REALLY needs 7 HDD bays in a normal desktop computer anyway? After all 3 HDDs can be installed so that there's an extra bay between each of them... HDD-bay designs are always compromises between number of drives and amount of wasted space. If you had a couple of nicelyt spaced drive bays in a case like this then people would come ranting about not having enough bays

 

bah, this case was on my shortlist
now it isnt... Gonna have to wait to see how much the coolermaster atcs 840 is when it hits the shops

 

Well... for those who can't afford 1TB or even 1.5TB drives, you end up with a bunch of hard drives.
I own a Lian Li PC-101B case which is filled with 7 harddrives. I had to buy an extra Lian Li drive cage because the six drive slots was not enough.

Most reviews even these on Bit-tech only test the cases with a minimum of required stuff for a computer. That is MAX 1 HDD, 1 graphics card, no extra PCI cards (RAID controllers etc), only 1 DVD burner (many have two or a Reader+Burner setup).

Time to do some stress testing of the case as well and try to see how much stuff you can really fit while still keep it tidy. I'm sure most of the midi cases will fail miserably. It does not look pretty inside my Lian Li case.

A picture for those who may be in doubt:

 

hmm not as impressive as I thought it was going to be...

 

Like Silverstone cases, Don't like that front I/O location, still, i like my TJ07W far too much to want this

Sam