The Silverstone Fortress FT04 has been available on Newegg and Amazon for about a month, but for some reason, no one in the English-speaking world seems to have reviewed it or even discussed it much. Anandtech and a couple other sites reviewed the RV04, which is the same chassis but with cheaper styling, and with AP181 instead of AP182 fans and with no acoustic padding. The RV04 was criticized for its fit and finish, but had excellent thermals. Since other Silverstone cases using 180mm Air Penetrator fans (especially the FT02 and TJ08-E) have gotten very good results overall, I'd be interested to know if anyone has tried the FT04 and what they thought of it.

Here's a review in Googlish from Planet 3D Now.

I'm aware of several other foreign reviews as well, but as I noted, everyone in the English-speaking world seems to be ignoring this case for mysterious reasons.

Personally i dont see it that great nor bad, its a big TJ08-E at more than twice the price. For me the FT04 should have remained similar to the FT02, with the oritention of the IO to the top, still today is among the best air cooling cases, i have no doubt that it will still win over the FT04.... even though its a RV04 review it should have very similar temps, check this review,

Bit-Tech SilverStone Raven RV04 Review



Personally i was looking forward to it, but totally dissapointed on the design, for now im going with fractal till i see the FT05, this is if they return to the design of the FT02.

the FT02 is such a sexy case. Even to RV02 works if you are on a cheaper budget. I'm gonna go for an FT02 or RV02 build for skylake. Right now I have a nanoxia deep silence 1 case. But I kinda wanna build an rv02 case out now. It's ok I can wait for skylake. Built a corsair 550d ivy bridge pc last year now going for the nanoxia deep silence 1 haswell build but this one has to make it to skylake since no LGA for broadwell.

Newegg are some little sneaks. The nanoxia DS1 case was 109 when I ordered now they jacked it up to 129. Shady shady newegg tsk tsk. Can't wait to get this build together. I'm slumming it out on a *cough* dell *cough* XPS 7100 with an amd phenom II x6 1100t @ 4.26Ghz (replaced stock cooler with a corsair H80) and a radeon 5870 gpu @ stock. It's not exactly slumming but boy oh boy is it loud. The corsair 550d system was sold and this is my crappy backup

man o man i get off topic easy sorry bout that.

It's pretty sick even with the ft02 fans on the low setting it cools almost the same as high. Now thats some engineering right there.

Anandtech reviewed the FT04 today. Looks like they still have some concerns about build quality - I'm most concerned about the front door snagging. One of the translated reviews also said that it doesn't hold shut with as much force as it should. I'd be interested to hear more about this - it seems like the biggest potential problem with the case.

Seems like on low speed, the thermals and acoustics are both very good. Since the AP182 fans have analog controllers, this can be finely tuned. I think they would have gotten better GPU test results if they hadn't used an outdated video card with fins perpendicular to the airflow direction. This case (or any other direct-airflow case) would probably rock an Accclero S1 Plus. I bet you could easily get to 150W+ TDP with just the intake fans, leaving the Accelero itself completely silent.

Regarding the Deep Silence 1, it looks like Newegg did indeed jack up the price - strangely, on only the black version. The white one (which they just got in recently) is still $109.99. At least they have them back in stock.

Not to insult Anandtech or the guy who reviewed it but that reads more like a whiny blog entry than a case review. About half of the content is him whining, the other half is a bunch of random haphazard comparisons to other cases, there is no in-depth review of the cooling system, the fans, etc. I mean, he didn't even compare it to the FT02!

Maybe I've been spoiled by SPCR's high quality thorough reviews so much that when I see other sites review cases/fans/coolers it always seems so amateurish.

I'm a bit curious about this case as well. Since I have both the FT02 (main gaming machine) and the TJ08-E (light gaming/htpc), I'm a bit impressed with Silverstones AP181 and the airflow/noise ratio in these cases with the AP181 (after putting fans on a fan controller with FT02 and a resistor for the fan on the TJ08-E).

My biggest gripe with the TJ08-E is the hard drive cage. Since its a HTPC, I can forgive noise a bit more, but I have considered more then once to let the whole cage rest on some silicon and attach it with zip ties or something instead.

The FT04 seems to have the same cage. I'm going to use it for a gaming build, so I can get away with having an SSD for OS and a mechanical hard drive for storage. But, the bottom cages doesn't seem to offer a good solution against hard drive vibration. I could remove one of the bottom cages and tie the hard drive down on some foam in the bottom, but then I'll loose the CPU cooler support.

If anyone gets this case, I would appreciate if someone could test the native HD solutions and see if there is any rattle or vibration noises.