SilverStone Fortress FT04 Case Review

The Fortress FT04 and Raven RV04 both inherit the concepts of their thermal design from SilverStone's incredibly popular and successful Temjin TJ08-E. That enclosure is a micro-ATX affair, but the principles that drive that case (and its excellent thermal performance) are present here. It's something that other vendors still seem to be struggling with: direct airflow over the hot components. Not this bottom-front to top-rear airflow, just a straight line. And thus, SilverStone does with two incredibly powerful 180mm fans what takes other vendors a lot more effort.

There's a tremendous amount of adjustability with both integrated fans; they can run whisper quiet at a low speed or as loudly and powerfully as a pair of Deltas, so much so that they were rattling the blinds in my room from five feet away after going through the case. Ordinarily I'd test at the lowest and highest settings, but I tried to modulate a middle setting as well. The reality is that you can easily adjust and get as little or as much performance as you want from these fans, so take the test results as a sort of starting point.

Ambient temperatures during testing hovered between 23C and 25C.

CPU performance is great, but one place where that diagonal airflow situation does seem to perform slightly better is with open-air graphics card coolers. The results on our GTX 560 Ti aren't awful, but they're merely competitive. Compare that to the CPU performance, which is basically bulletproof.

Noise levels are less than ideal, but remember, the minimum fan setting is really the worst case scenario. Look at how massive the gulf is between each fan setting.

Overclocking is very kind to the FT04 on the CPU side, less so on the GPU. SilverStone even recommends blower style coolers for the FT04 and RV04 in the manual, and I wholeheartedly agree.

Noise levels are again tricky, with the FT04's highest fan setting basically cancelling out any internal noise. It would've taken some time and tuning to find an ideal fan setting for our testbed and again, it's going to depend on your build.

Finally, where the FT04 really shines is with the full fat testbed.

The blower-style coolers are exactly in the FT04's wheelhouse. This is the best possible scenario for this case and it, like the old FT02, is a borderline ideal enclosure for air-cooled multi-GPU systems.

Once again, noise levels aren't excellent, but there's obviously wiggle room here. The FT04 is as powerful or as quiet as you need.