SilverStone Fortress FTZ01 Review

The inside of the FTZ01, like the RVZ01 can look a little scary at first - it's far from an empty shell. The motherboard sits right in one corner with an L-shaped space free for the rest of the hardware. The PCU sits next to the motherboard but away from the rear panel. As a result, SilverStone includes a PSU extension cable, which attached to the PSU at the front before running around the edge of the case to the rear with a female socket allowing you to plug your kettle lead in as normal.


The PSU is housed in a casing - we were a little perplexed by this at first as it makes installation a trickier than it otherwise might be. However, there's a good reason for this - it provides the FTZ01's lone 3.5in hard disk mount. Incredibly, despite sporting a 3.5in mount, enough room for full-size GPUs and a slimline optical bay, there's still room for up to three 2.5in drives all in dedicated mounts, so you could still use the 3.5in bay even if all three of these and the optical mount are occupied - impressive stuff.


The genius part to the FTZ01 comes in the form of a removable panel, which houses two of the 2.5in mounts, the optical drive mount and the graphics card. There's not enough room for the graphics card to sit upright, so SilverStone has used an angled riser card that connects the GPU to the PCI-E socket. This does mean that installation and removing your hardware is trickier and more time-consuming than some other mini-ITX cases but the benefits outweigh the downsides here by a long way.

The three fan mounts are strategically located to provide maximum assistance to the GPU and CPU fans, with the two included fans acting as intakes - pretty much the only option given their location as they'd otherwise be working against the hardware fans with disastrous consequences.

The CPU is possibly the only issue - it will receive plenty of cool air from the 120mm fan located right above it, but getting the air out relies on the CPU fan and cooler design alone.


This does mean that the case depends on side-exhausting CPU fans, the PSU and graphics card to get hot air out of the case but the compartmentalised nature of the FTZ01 means that heat buildup shouldn't be too much of an issue, especially as there are vents dotted around too.


At the very least you should make sure the cooler, if possible, points any exhausts towards the rear of the case, but an all-in-one liquid cooler could dump the heat straight out of the case too.


In general, installing a system into the FTZ01 is straightforward, but a little more involved than something like a BitFenix Prodigy or Phanteks EVOLV ITX, and you'll need to spend some time tying up cables too as there's little by way of cable routeing. In addition, if you opt for an SFX-L PSU, there will be little space in front of the PSU itself as standard to hide things as we have done.