SilverStone’s Fortress 2 USB 3.0 tops our thermal performance chart as the coolest-running solution, due entirely to its excellent graphics cooling. On the other hand, it also exhibits fairly high CPU temperatures. Since heat pipes are designed to operate in a normally-oriented tower, SilverStone causes the heat pipes of most CPU coolers to behave differently by rotating the motherboard and CPU cooler 90°, while at the same time improving just about every other thermal condition.

The warmest cases in the above chart are revealed to be some of the quietest in the chart below. SilverStone’s cool-running FT02S-USB3.0 barely stays within our 42 dB(A) quiet case cutoff. We blame the orientation of the motherboard on this one. The top-venting GPU exhaust is much closer to our meter than the rear-vented exhaust of normally-oriented cases.

The first step in comparing temperature to noise is to turn a lower temperature result into a higher score. To begin, we average the temperature reading of all cases, and divide that number by each case’s average temperature to produce an inverse percentage-based thermal performance scale. Each case’s average noise level is then divided by the average for all cases, creating a direct percentage-based acoustic performance scale.
The term Relative in the Acoustic Efficiency chart refers to how each case relates, percentage-wise, to the class average of 100% efficiency. Since efficiencies greater than 100% are impossible, we simply move the baseline class average to 0% by subtracting the number 1 from each result.

Although it barely ducks in under our quiet case limits, the FT02S-USB3.0’s temperatures are low enough to put it on top of our heat-to-noise comparison.
- 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?