SilverStone Fortress FT03

There's an angled 120mm intake fan at the bottom of the chassis next to the ATX power supply mount and above the power supply mount near the slim optical drive bay is another 120mm fan to blow against the motherboard and CPU socket area. There is also room for an optional 80/92mm fan to blow against the expansion slot area. On the opposite side of the motherboard tray are the internal drive bays. This design is cleaner by not having excessive cables run through the main area of the chassis that could obstruct airflow and just lead to cluttered cable management. There is also an aluminum heatsink to assist with the heat transfer generated by the drive(s).

Due to the compact design, graphics / expansion cards cannot be longer than 350mm, the CPU cooler must be shorter than 167mm, and the power supply must be less than 180mm deep.

Setup:

With the FT03, SilverStone also sent over a 750W Strider Gold modular power supply and with that, they included the PP05 short cables to make the cable organization very manageable for this compact chassis. A review on this power supply will be posted separately in the near future, but it worked out very well with this compact chassis for effective cable organization while certainly providing more than enough power for an AMD Fusion build. The rest of the hardware was an ASUS Hudson micro-ATX motherboard with AMD E-350 Fusion APU, 4GB of system memory, OCZ SSD, and integrated graphics.

While the chassis is not deep at all, it was very easy to work with and there were no problems with the installation of any of the components. The included fans also operated near silently and pushed through enough air to not require the ASUS fan on the Fusion APU, even when the 1.6GHz E-350 was overclocked to 1.8GHz.

Overall, it was a simple, clean, and easy build. A Radeon HD 4890 was also tested to verify it would fit and that worked just fine. In pounding the system with OpenSSL, C-Ray, video playback, and other tasks at no point did its temperature spike too high and quickly recessed when the load was laxed. The above graph is from this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.