Silverstone Fortress FT03-MINI PC Chassis Review

With all the side panels removed, which remove easily by simply pulling at them thanks to their clip-in system, we can see just how unique this chassis really is, while there isn’t much to look at inside the chassis, it being almost empty, you can see mouted on the right hand side the slim optical drive bracket, which also has a 3.5 and 2.5″ drive bracket mounted to it.

With everything removed, its easy to see there is in fact a lot of space in this chassis, offering a clean airflow from top to bottom of the whole case, very important in such a compact design.

I decided that with so little to show, I would take a half built photo to show the placement of the motherboard and power supply within the chassis, as you can also see we have fitted the i5 2500k with a slim line Akasa CPU cooler to save on space, not much chance of fitting out Antec 920 water cooling block in here.

With the motherboard and power supply in place the top of the chassis now makes a lot more sense, as you can see with the top panel off all the I/O ports are well spaced on the top of the chassis and there is still plenty of ventilation.

Now we have our SSD drive installed, which you can see on the bottom right hand side just under the power supply, it is mounted on the rear of the optical drive bay. There is a lot of cables in this chassis, not helped by the fact the PSU is non-modular, but looks can be deceiving as there is still surprisingly a lot of room in there and with a quick cable tie I was able to keep the central area unobstructed to keep a good air flow.

And surprise surprise! I did in fact manage to fit out GTX 560 Ti in there, I won’t lie to you, it was a squeeze, but a dual expansion slot design card, that isn’t exactly small with its ample sized dual fan cooling system, that is nearly the length of the entire chassis interior fitted in this case, which is impressive which ever way you look at it. There is just under 2CM of space between the side panel and the intake fans on the GPU, which should be more than enough for air flow with the bottom fan blowing air directly up in to the card and the chassis.

Now that we have our card installed and all the panels back in place, everything looks clean and tidy again just as it did when we took it out the box.