The FT02S-USB3.0 orients motherboards with the rear-panel pointing up, so the foam acoustic pad we might have expected to see on its top panel is instead found on the rear.

The Fortress 2’s aluminum face panel is actually one U-shaped piece of aluminum that wraps around the base and up the rear. Three 180 mm fans draw in air from a gap between the base of the exterior U-shaped panel and the bottom interior panel.

The FT02S-USB3.0’s five hard drive trays are oriented vertically in a single cage. Three-and-a-half-inch drives mount via shoulder screws and grommets, while 2.5” drives mount using screws alone. Handy flip-panels latch or unlatch the drives in four of the case’s five external 5.25” drive bays, with the uppermost bay requiring screws.

The Fortress 2 doesn’t have very much space behind the motherboard tray for cable management. Instead the builder must rely on his or her own creativity to make cables look organized in this peculiarly-arranged chassis.

Designed to house five drive backplanes, the FT02S-USB3.0 ships with just one of its CP05 hard drive connectors. Additional connectors are available online, including a new SAS hot-swap version.

We can’t fault anyone for thinking that the FT02S-USB3.0 looks more like a workstation than a PC chassis. SilverStone clearly had workstation support in mind because the Fortress 2's motherboard tray includes mounts for SSI-CEB form factor server boards.
Accommodating expansion cards any longer than 12.2” requires the removal of at least the middle intake fan.
- Nearing The Quiet Gaming Goal?
- Lian Li PC-B12
- Inside Lian Li’s PC-B12
- More PC-B12 Features
- Building With The PC-B12
- Nanoxia Deep Silence 1
- Inside Nanoxia’s Deep Silence 1
- More Deep Silence 1 Features
- Building With The Deep Silence 1
- SilverStone Fortress 2 USB 3.0
- Inside The Fortress 2 USB 3.0
- More Fortress 2 USB 3.0 Features
- Building With The Fortress 2 USB 3.0
- Test Settings
- Heat, Noise, And Heat Versus Noise
- Quality And Value: Part 3 Cases, Analyzed
- Quiet Gaming Case Quest, Series Conclusion
Thanks for that; I was wondering when it would arrive.
He is running dual AMD 5850's with axial fans and a Corsair H50 water cooler cooling an AMD 8150, it's very quiet even at full fan.
In my P280 I have a OC Intel i7-3770k with an Antec 920 water cooler and 2 scythe 2k rpm fans, with the scythe at full power and the 920 on aggressive thermal settings it keeps he 4.7ghz oc under 50 deg c under almost all loads while not being excessively loud.
It would be interesting to repeat the tests with an axially-cooled graphics card. After all, that style of cooler would be the choice of someone building for low noise. Of particular interest would be the resulting temperature differences, especially of the Silverstone.
Toms, thanks for doing this series it was really nice to see the time and in depth detail put into this. I will be bookmarking these for reference on my future builds.
Half finished building with it last night. Once you get th R4, you can tell that a lot of thought went into building this case. I'm still a novice when it comes to cable management, but FD makes it real easy. For $80, IMO, you're getting a steal.
Yea this competition combined with the killer R4 price is a no brainer for me. I was going to get the corsair 550d but not now.
I'm disappointed that the Corsair did so poorly with noise reduction, I thought from previous tests elsewhere that it did fine with that but had some cooling issues that could be resolved by removing the HDD cages and loading up all the fan postions. Unfortunately it seems that it would be louder still in that configuration.
Nice review, guys. I appreciate it...
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/rv02-e-lian-li-sonata-iv,2946-6.html
P183 ould have been interesting alternative. It should be more silent than p280? but harder to build because of dual chamber solution. Still it would be nice to see it compared to P280, if there are any real differences. If I am building silent gaming machine the case can be even a little bit more expensive if it can achieve good results. You can get gaming casis really cheaply, but they are definitely not silent...
What are you referring to?
(just curious...)
Maybe ask for your money back?
Sorry, but it bugs me when people whine so much about such minutiae. You're getting a lot of informative content for free. How do you think they feel after doing all this testing and writing to see snarky comments like these?