Since the motherboard is rotated, its connectors are available on the top panel, and on FT02 the power supply is also installed on the top panel. FT02 comes with a meshed door on its top panel, which is great, because when you have your PC assembled you can simply close the top panel and you won’t be seeing all the cables and connectors. The cables that come out from the top panel (power cord, video monitor, keyboard, etc) can be routed to the rear panel, so you can close the top panel.

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Figure 5: Top panel closed.

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Figure 6: Top panel opened.

The top panel is identical to the one used on Raven RV02. It features seven expansion slots, all using vented covers, which is great to improve airflow. The area above the expansion cards has several holes, also improving airflow. There are no holes for passing hoses from liquid cooling solutions. A 120 mm fan is available here (1,200 rpm, 19 dBA, small three-pin connector). There is also a small space for you to install SilverStone’s SST-CLEARCMOS product.

There are three speed switches available on the top panel, which control the speed of the three bottom 180 mm fans available. Each switch has only two positions: “high” and “low.”

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Figure 7: Fan speed controllers.

The buttons and connectors are available on the top panel, and FT02 comes only with two USB ports (far away from each other, thus allowing you to install two “fat” USB devices at the same time), not coming with eSATA or FireWire ports.

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Figure 8: Buttons and connectors.

Now let’s take a look inside SilverStone Fortress FT02.