You know what we like? Choice. Choice is good, especially when you’re looking at premium products. This year it seems that Silverstone has really anchored itself onto that mantra with its latest swathe of cases for this year's CES.
SETA A1 - $120 - 15th Jan 2020
The SETA A1 is the first in a long list of new chassis from the company and boy is it something special. With a sleek curved aluminum front panel, surrounding a steel shell, and a tempered glass side panel, the SETA A1 is available in potentially five different color skus. On the show floor we spotted three of those five, black and silver, white and copper, and the black and anthracite grey models, however marketing materials suggest that there may also be a black on black version and a white and pink variant as well.
It’s that front panel that’s most striking, and with an ATX interior complete with PSU shroud cover, support for vertical GPUs, and plenty of modern touches it’s a chassis that looks to be capable of even giving Apple a run for its money in the design department, but without costing the earth.
According to Silverstone it also supports up to 2x 200mm front intake fans, and comes with some impressive ARGB lighting as well, although we’ll have to wait and see for that one.
FARA B1 & R1 - $59 - Q1 2020
Next up we have Silverstone’s Fara B1 and R1 cases. The R1 (the one on the right) features a honeycomb mesh front panel, to help provide plenty of front intake airflow, whilst the B1 although featuring a similar interior, has a more traditional external front panel, that doesn’t quite provide the same intake access. That said, as we know from our testing, not all mesh is made equally, so we’ll have to wait and see just how this performs in our benchmarks.
According to Silverstone the Fara also has a “precisely designed interior” to provide sufficient space for high-end graphics cards and multiple cooling solutions. Unfortunately we didn’t get a chance to take a look at the insides but from what we can gather from the specs, it should support up to the ATX motherboard form factor, a standard ATX PSU (160mm max), GPUs up to 325mm in length (with the front case fans installed), and the CPU cooler can reach a height of 165mm.
Cooling support is also a dead giveaway that this follows a more traditional internal orientation, as the front supports up to a 280mm rad, and the roof up to 240mm.
Alta F1 - $169 - TBD
Then we have the Alta F1. This is more of a premium chassis, and follows Silverstone’s traditional crazy internal layouts, with a 90 degree rotated motherboard mounting system. It even comes with a vertical GPU mount, so you can have your graphics card fans or waterblock facing the window, but at a 90 degree angle instead, which is something we’ve not seen from a case manufacturer before.
You also get support for a dual-layer 180mm/160mm fan setup, or you can install up to three 140mm/120mm fans. It’s an all aluminum shell wrapped around a steel-body and interior, and if we’re honest, it looks pretty sweet, if not a bit square.
Sugo SG14 - $70 (w/o PSU) - Q1 2020
Last but not least we have the Sugo SG14, this is actually quite the interesting case update. Based on the original SG13, the big difference from first glance is the removal of that mesh front panel. The reason for this is that Silverstone has redesigned the interior layout to double the cooling capacity of the case. In fact you can install up to a 280mm AIO radiator on the side of the chassis itself, and then also install a 120mm fan in the rear to act as an exhaust. Compared to last gen where the most you could install was a single 140mm AIO/fan in the front.
It also supports either an ITX or a Mini-DTX motherboard (such as the Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Impact), and can house full sized graphics cards up to 320mm in length and 187mm thick. It also supports a single 2.5-inch drive, and up to two 3.5-inch drives if you forsake that 280mm AIO cooler. All that gives it a remarkably small footprint for a case that can house a heck of a lot of processing power.
Anything Else?
Check out this dinky little M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD external dock. Yep you heard that right. The T16 M.2 Docking Station can connect to your PC via USB Type C Gen2, and even has a handy little power button as well. Admittedly, we’re not quite sure who’s going to have a drawer full of M.2 PCIe SSDs to use as storage drives, but still. Maybe SilverStone knows something about the price of NAND flash that we don’t just yet.
