SilverStone Fortress FT05 Mid-Tower Chassis Review

After having gone 3 years without looking at a SilverStone chassis, we’re back with a look at the company’s latest, the mid-tower Fortress FT05. Can it deliver on the promises of big cooling and big flexibility while retaining as small a footprint as possible? It’s time to man the fort and find out.

While it’s true that all of us here at Techgage have a job to do, we just can’t help ourselves when we see something that really piques our interests. For me it’s chassis, but more specifically smaller chassis with a unique interior layout. It just so happens that the brand new Fortress FT05 from SilverStone fits the bill, but there’s another reason why I’m excited to get my hands on it.

The very first chassis that I reviewed when I started this gig back in 2010 was the Fortress FT03, so when I saw that SilverStone was prepping a new version I jumped at the chance to be one of the first in North America to reveiw one. I’m not going to let SilverStone off easy just because of nostalgia, so let’s get started.

The top to bottom layout with the motherboard rotated 90 degrees returns in the FT05, and is also shared by the latest in SilverStone’s Raven series, the RV05. Where the black or silver aluminum-shelled FT05 differs from its siblings is that it still supports full-sized ATX motherboards, but the footprint isn’t much larger than some micro-ATX chassis at only 22.1cm wide, 48.3cm high, and 42.7cm deep. For those who don’t want to check, that’s pretty small for a mid-tower chassis, so how did SilverStone manage this?

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