Silverstone Fortress FT01

Interior

The side panels are attached with three screws; once these are removed, you need to lift up the lever to unlock the panels. To secure the chassis for LAN parties or similar gatherings, you can lock the lever with a small lock (not included with the chassis). Once you lift up the lever, the side panel releases and you can remove it easily.

The inside shows a very sleek design with the hard drives in the bottom of the front directly behind the 180mm fan. The optical drives sit in the top and are secured with a tool-less mounting system that we will describe later. Despite the size of the chassis, there is only space for a standard ATX form factor (or smaller) motherboard, since there isn't a lot of space on the right side of the case.

Each hard drive has its own drive bay together with a plastic frame. To get the frame out of the bay you will need to lift up the small lever on the right side and pull it towards yourself. There are two main frames for these drive bays; the lower one contains three mounting slots and the upper one four, allowing you to easily install up to seven hard drives. The side of the main frame contains large openings through which the air can flow. Since a large fan is right in front of the drives, it is necessary to leave enough space for the air to come through. The drives mount backwards, which means the jacks go in first. You will need to open the second side panel to attach cables and connectors to the hard drives. You can then guide the cables through the three long openings "behind" the drive cages.

Both intake fans have a filter installed right in front of them, which is one of the benefits of the positive pressure cooling design. Both filters appear to be easily accessible and therefore easy to clean. That's especially important given the large fans, since they will move lots of air and dust. The problem is, only the front air filter can actually be removed without some extra effort. The front filter simply slides out the side, but to get at the top filter you need to remove two screws, slide the fan towards the front, and then it will drop out -- at which point you can access the filter and clean it. Depending on what components you have installed in your system, however, getting at the two screws that need to be removed could prove difficult short of uninstalling some of the other components.

It's possible to route some cables behind the motherboard tray, but we couldn't fit all of the cables back there. We managed to put the fan cables there, but the cable for the 8-pin EPS12V connector was unfortunately too thick. There's a reason for the lack of space, however: acoustic dampening foam attached to both side panels. This should reduce noise emissions, and it should be particularly useful for those looking to build silent/near-silent systems. However, it doesn't help us much when you install a high-end (and loud) system like our test configuration.

The optical drives are secured with an easy screw-less mechanism; you just press the top of the button for each bay and it releases the drive. Of course, this may not work as well with nonstandard 5.25" options like fan controllers, so be warned that the mounting mechanism is primarily targeted at full size 5.25" devices. Screwless mounting of devices is possible, should you desire.

The power supply has another large opening right below it, which is good if you are running a power supply with a fan on the bottom. Silverstone also includes a filter here, which will help reduce dust buildup inside the power supply (at the cost of some airflow). It also means the power supply should run cooler, since it will have direct access to a fresh air supply. If you use such a power supply, it will not facilitate cooling of the main compartment, but the positive air pressure within the chassis means that shouldn't be a problem. That doesn't apply for users running a power supply with an 80mm fan, but we would generally recommend against that for this particular case.