Inside

Diving into the inside of the FT03 requires pulling the case apart, more than your typical case. We had already taken off the top panel, but to get all the way in I removed three of the 4 side panels as well. The fourth panel isn’t removable. The removable panels all pull right off with a little tug and are held in place by the clips as seen below.

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Peaking in from the side, we can finally see where Silverstone packed in the motherboard on the FT03. This case supports a Micro ATX motherboard, a bit larger than what we normally see in small footprint cases. There is more than enough room for two full length video cards if you need them as well on the left side. For cooling in this interesting case, there is a fan mounted over the motherboard area that is angled to blow over top of the motherboard and push the warm air up to the top exhaust fan. This isn’t a typical setup, but it’s nice to see they  did what they could to provide the motherboard as much cooling as possible. If you look closely just under the motherboard fan you will also see a small area where you can mount a slot loaded disc drive if you need one. This is the cases only option as there aren’t any 5.25 drive bays for drive use because of the cases size. There is a small issue with the slot loader that there isn’t an eject button on the outside of the case, so if you are trying to swap out disc outside of windows for example, you will have to take the front off of the case to do this. Personally I prefer to run USB DVD drives anyhow, there isn’t any reason to carry the drive with me everywhere I go after installing windows.

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I mentioned earlier the 3.5 inch hot swap that is mounted on the top of the case. With the side panels off we can see the guys of the hotswap as well as two more hard drive mounting locations. Both mounts have rubber vibration dampening mounting points for the hard drives. I like that one is facing down and the other sideways towards the same area, this puts them close enough together to be able to share a SATA power connection for example, while not being packed too closely together. There is support for CPU coolers up to 167mm’s tall; we will see how it all fits when we get to the installation though.

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I’m sure you are wondering where they tucked away the power supply in the FT03. All the way down at the bottom you have a hole for the power supply that has up to 180mm’s of depth. This means if you are buying an FT03 you need to double check the length of your power supply as well as if you are ordering one. We had to put our normal test power supply aside for a smaller 850 watt PSU, still more power than you should ever need in this configuration. Next to the power supply is a 120mm fan that is angled to fit into the space of a double wide 80mm fan mount. This gets the airflow needed without compromising noise output. You can also see the power supply power cable. As mentioned before, the power plug for the FT03 is on the bottom, this cable plugs into your power supply and runs down to that plug.

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garfi3ld's Avatar
garfi3ld replied the topic: #28669 20 Dec 2012 03:50
I'm sure Skyler will have thoughts to add to this one considering he had this same case for a while. Check out our review of the FT03 from Silverstone

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