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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GeorgeH - Thursday, April 28, 2011 - link
When I want compact I almost always also want quiet, and 45dB is far from extraordinary.If they had used the unique design to facilitate more noise reduction this would have gone on my list. As it is I'm not impressed at all, especially when you consider that the extra costs this case will entail put it within spitting distance of the FT02.
slacr - Thursday, April 28, 2011 - link
First off, the slimline DVD, I didn't get myself one as they are expensive. For the most part you can make do without it though, OS installs are readily available through USB and most drivers can be found online. It can be a bit of a chore when you REALLY need something of a disc but I figure that happens to me at max once a year.The stock fans are not very good though, there seems to be some unnecessary turbulence around the angled intake fan near the graphics-card too when using a mid-high flow fan. The noise is really bothering me too, still working on that (with i5 2500k, p8p67m-pro and asus GTX560).
As for cable routing, it mostly works fine although some of the holes are a bit too small, when using an mATX board accessing the headers for sound/usb is not very neat. Fixing it would require added case depth though.
Over all im quite pleased with the diminutive stature, fitting snugly on a tiny desk with 2 monitors, the plasticky side vent facing away from me, it sticks out a tad less in black too.
archer75 - Thursday, April 28, 2011 - link
Saw this same case in my PC Gamer magazine for a computer digital storm is selling. It's certainly not new.Dustin Sklavos - Thursday, April 28, 2011 - link
Not that long, this case has only been available for a couple months, and I actually have that DigitalStorm unit in house right now. That review'll be going up soon.Rick83 - Thursday, April 28, 2011 - link
You didn't adress it :(Was hoping to see some GPU cooler recommendations, as down-pointing heat-pipes don't work well and down-blowing fans blow right into the lower fan. On the other hand, the radial, exhausting designs are often noisy under load (see the GTX580 in this case).
I'm thinking about getting a HD 6950 with this case, but can't really decide on a cooling solution (and there hasn't been a VGA-round-up recently either...)
Any pointers? I was eventually thinking about getting a dual fan solution, like a twin frozr III or a directCU, but then stock isn't too bad at load....but not optimal either.
slacr - Thursday, April 28, 2011 - link
Ah, the heatpipe issue passed me by until you pointed it out.I first used this with a OEM cooler XFX 6950, it was LOUD at load, with the fan reving up to over 35% it was too much for me. I think the DirectCU2 should be the least noisy one, however you will orient the pipes down, I now use a DirectCU2 GTX560, which is only 2 slots with much slimmer fans, pipes pointing down. With a custom fan curve and less vcore (0.95) its quite silent (don't hear it over the case fans in the games i play). If the 6950 DirectCU were available when i bought it i'd have gotten that instead, it will end up veery close to the fan on the bottom though.
Rick83 - Thursday, April 28, 2011 - link
Thanks for the info. Guess stock cooler is out of the question then.Next challenge is finding the right cooler, there's a lot of designs out there that have not been properly reviewed, from one to three fans...Still hoping for a sapphire Vapor-X to join the fray as well.
Oh well, probably going to wait for Z68 to happen anyway, so I can get a third DVI output, without having to pay for the sapphire flex or an miniDP to dvi active adapter.. Just got DCS:A10, and I see a triple screen setup becoming a possibility. Thanks to spanning window mode now working, I won't even have to limit myself to eyefinity and whatnot..
7Enigma - Thursday, April 28, 2011 - link
I'm interested in some more specifics of how bad this issue really is. I've honestly never heard of it before. Are we talking for extreme overclocking or in general they are not very efficient?I've always hated the idea of having heavy cards "hanging" with tower systems and thought this method of vertical hanging would be great for alleviating that stress, but this heatpipe issue is new to me.
Thanks for bringing it up and hopefully the author of the article can chime in.
Rick83 - Thursday, April 28, 2011 - link
Well, the heatpipe works by evaporating a liquid which gathers at the bottom of the heatpipe and then rises to the top where it condenses. This doesn't work as well if the heat source is above the lower end of the heatpipe. The exact impact though, I've not seen it examined. It can't be that bad, as many heatpipe designs for VGA coolers double back on themselves, which has a similar aspect.Still, would be awesome if such obvious compatibility challenges would be addressed by even a single reviewer...
Spoelie - Thursday, April 28, 2011 - link
Still working through the review, but thought I'd already chime in. The design is interesting for certain, I don't buy anything other than mATX boards lately, but would never consider this case because of the storage system.* 4 is really the bare minimum for me (currently have 3 3.5" and 1 SSD)
* mounting system, took most of the timelapse video...
* no airflow
* direct contact with sidepanels/metal???
Especially that last point surprises me, that truly is a worst case scenario for transferring vibration noise. Personally think suspension + airflow is a far superior alternative to "heatsink" type cooling for drives. Seems like I'll be sticking to my P182 for a while yet.