SilverStone FT03: Nothing Else Like It
by Dustin Sklavos on April 28, 2011 12:25 AM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
- SilverStone
In and Around the SilverStone FT03
For scale, the FT03 is about the size of a small dustbin or a couple of shoeboxes stacked up. The Corsair Graphite 600T that now houses my personal machine honestly looks kind of silly and needlessly large compared to the FT03 at nearly twice the depth.
SilverStone offers the FT03 in both silver and black finishes; our review unit has the silver and white finish while the black unit will be seen in our upcoming system review. Externally there isn't a whole lot going on; SilverStone keeps the finish attractive, simple, and resilient. The front of the tower has a tasteful embedded SilverStone logo and a slot for the internal slot-loading optical drive, while the left side has a removable vent for one of the bottom-mounted intake fans. The bottom has a removable fan filter that attaches magnetically; the power cable for the FT03 also routes under here. Finally, the top of the case has a removable white plastic grate that fits well with the overall styling, and this covers the I/O shield, four expansion bays, hot-swap bay, and exhaust fan. There are indentations on the side panels to allow for cabling to route between the grate and the case itself, and there's a small panel at the tippy-top that has the power and reset buttons along with the bridged USB 3.0 ports (sorry, no motherboard header support yet) and headphone and microphone jacks. Overall it's a very clean and slick looking design, at least externally.
There are admittedly a couple of hitches, though. If you have to use any kind of video port adapter, like DVI-to-VGA or Mini-HDMI-to-HDMI, you'll want to use a flexible dongle or an adapter cable; the hard physical adapters wind up rising above where the grate would be and thus prevent you from using it. I also found myself frequently accidentally hitting the power and reset buttons when moving the case, which isn't a huge problem but isn't ideal either. Plugging in the system can also be a little difficult because the plug on the bottom is recessed, and the magnetically attached filter feels pretty loose. To wit: the review unit from the boutique builder I have doesn't even include that filter. I'll also go ahead and spare you the wait: I would've liked to have seen a fan controller included in the top panel. If wishes were fishes, etc. etc., but it would be a welcome addition.
When you get to the internals is when things start getting really interesting. The two side panels slide up and off easily (maybe a little too easily), while the face snaps on and off easily and securely. SilverStone engineered the guts of the FT03 in a very slick way that actually winds up maximizing the space inside. While we use a Mini-ITX board for testing, there's space in here for a Micro-ATX board and two large video cards. The power supply cubby also works remarkably well, and cable routing is smart.
If there's one area of concern, it's the side of the case designed to house storage. There's space here for two 3.5" (or 2.5" with adapters) drives and a 2.5" drive, as well as an additional 3.5" hot-swap bay complete with connecting cables. The essential problem is that there's virtually no airflow here. That's mitigated somewhat by the aluminum side panels which are good at radiating the heat off of the drives and allowing them to be passively-cooled, and the hot-swap bay in particular is cooled by a large chunk of aluminum affixed to the side panel itself. The design here is as smart as it could conceivably be, as the drive mounts are designed specifically to put the drives themselves in contact with the side panel. Later on you'll see drive temperatures measured were more or less in line with what hard drives in notebooks hit, and are well within drive tolerances, but if the FT03 has an Achilles' Heel it's here. To be fair, though, I don't think I could armchair engineer a better solution than what SilverStone has done.
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Dustin Sklavos - Thursday, April 28, 2011 - link
Good micro-ATX boards will have the same kinds of overclocking goodies as their full ATX kin.Slimline optical drives are fairly standardized, so in this instance you just have to find one that slot-loads. SilverStone sells one on their site.
dalenchm0b - Thursday, April 28, 2011 - link
***WARNING, THIS IS A LONG POST***I can answer some of your questions, since I am actually burning in one of these cases right now. The optical drive this case uses is the same type of drive found in those more expensive laptops where the drive sucks in the disc as opposed to a tray popping out. It's the same mechanism for the Wii and PS3 optical drives. There aren't too many models available, but you can readily find them on eBay. Just search for "slot load dvd" and "slot load blu-ray". Personally, I don't think I will buy one anyway because USB flash drives are cheap and I can just use that since we are moving towards digital distribution anyway.
As for the motherboard, I am currently running stability tests on an overclocked i7-920 @ 3.8 GHz using the Asus Rampage III Gene. The RIIIG is a 1366 mATX mobo that supports SLI and CF, so I am definitely going to take advantage of that one day when I upgrade my old GTX 260 to some HD 6000 or GTX 500 series goodness. I am using a Corsair H60 with medium speed Yate Loons in push-pull. In fact, I replaced all the fans with Yate Loons since I have had good results with them and they are nice and cheap. I replaced the GPU fan at the bottom of the case with 2 80mm Yates, because the 120mm fan uses a bracket that directs air at an angle instead of directly upwards. I didn't bother going with an SSD, instead I am using two WD 640 GB black drives in RAID 0 for the OS and apps, while a 2 TB Samsung F4 provides storage. The reviewer isn't kidding about the side panels passively cooling the drives, because I can touch the side of the case and feel exactly where the drives are from the heat these bad boys are giving off. Powering this little bastard is a fully modular Seasonic X750. It should provide enough power for dual gpu goodness as long as I stick with mainstream level cards.
Anyway, I'm currently benching at 3.8 GHz and its been stable for a few hours now but the 4 cores with hyperthreading enabled and all 8 threads active is making the CPU just a tad too warm for my taste at 72 C. I'll probably give the silverstone fans a test run and see if they can cool it down some more, but otherwise its doing pretty damn good I think.
I am satisfied with the case and would recommend it to someone looking to maximize desk space while looking simple yet elegant. Thanks for reading!
coldcase - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link
Sorry but I'm not finding that design appealing at all. Looks like a mini fridge.7Enigma - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link
Hi guys,Read your article yesterday and then this morning saw this deal on a slimline DVD/CD burner ($23). Hope this helps some of you reading this and wanting to get the FT03 (not me):
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
7Enigma - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link
Scratch my last comment, too early in the morning. This was for a slimline but not slot-loading it appears.james007 - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link
I appreciate the in-depth article. However - what about that optical-drive, which has to be "slot-loading"??? Exactly which models are going to fit this thing? The "setup" table doesn't say what he put into this. I would think, since our whole purpose in reading this article is to gleen the benefit of the author's experience in order to ascertain whether to use this in our own build - and to help as a guide in building it -- that this is one of the primary items he'd cover.I see precious few slot-loading optical drives available from online retailers, and zero information on which to get. Any helpful thoughts on this?
araczynski - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link
i guess to each their own, but to me, it looks like a silver paper shredder trashcan.EnzoFX - Friday, April 29, 2011 - link
I just don't think these reviews do any cases justice. SPCR does it best, a case is about cooling, how well it can run at given tdp/overall power usage/and how quiet. Saying it has decent noise levels isn't very helpful. I remember an old review saying that noise was below the ambient 30+ dB's which then prompted me to ignore the entire thing.cordis - Saturday, April 30, 2011 - link
"To be fair, though, I don't think I could armchair engineer a better solution than what SilverStone has done."Really? I came up with a couple variations:
smaller wooden box - http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php...
larger brass box - http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php...
The easiest way they could have done this would be to just put one big fan at the bottom of the box, put the optical slot in vertically, maybe put the psu near the top of the case, and just keep the air paths open all the way up. If the fan at the bottom overlaps both chambers, you can easily get enough cooling that way. In my homemade cases, I put separate fans on each side, but I'm thinking about another one with a single fan at the bottom. I'm not thrilled with this case, it's not nearly as elegant as the other rotated motherboard cases they have. I appreciate that they're still being creative, though.
shyrix - Saturday, April 30, 2011 - link
I love this case. i put in dual 6870's, asus p8p67-m pro, i2500k,h70, corsair vengeance sticks, ocz vertex ssd raid0fit it all, documented my build via facebook. lots of photos...just click through to facebook album.
http://shylock.net/sandybridge
has strider psu, with short cable kit.
i can answer any questions about this case/build