Silverstone Fortress FT03-MINI PC Chassis Review

The FT-03 presented a fresh challenge and a very different approach to what were used to seeing with our chassis reviews, it doesn’t take long to notice that Silverstone have put a lot of thought into the ergonomics of this chassis, the end result being a chassis that was still able to handle a GTX 560 graphics card and still have more than ample room for sufficient airflow.

But the most impressive feature of this chassis has to be its foot print, if you have very limited floor space, or perhaps just a small office, every bit of space matters, and with the FT-03 using an innovative vertical layout the amount of floor space required for this chassis is kept to a minimum. It’s also strange that this tower looks quite tall, because of its slim width, but as you can see in our build photos, it’s not that much taller than the length of our graphics card.

The only thing I didn’t like about this chassis was the top panel, which is made of a very glossy cheap plastic, it’s more than up to the job and doesn’t look too bad, but in my opinion a lass glossy finish would have really added to the premium look of the case and been more in keeping with the darker thick metal side panels.

So if your looking for a PC chassis that would make an ideal HTPC, office PC, or if you’re willing to accept the challenge of fitting a powerful GPU and putting a little thought into the cooling of the system, then a very decent gaming system is possible with this chassis, such as the Potenza i7 rig found here. Clever engineering and a very high build quality (aside from the top panel) does of course come at quite a price, clocking in at just over £100 there is no doubt that this chassis is a little specialist, but it ticks so many boxes for a chassis in the M-ITX category that I still feel happy awarding it with our Editors Choice Award, simply because Silverstone have delivered so much for such a small chassis.