There's no denying that SilverStone comes up with some of the most innovative case designs in the market and the FT03 – also known as the Fortress – is possibly its most unusual case to date. At CeBIT the company was showing off a mini-ITX version of the FT03 simply called the FT03-mini which radically shrinks the chassis.
According to SilverStone a lot of its customers were complaining about the fact that the FT03 wasn't small enough, despite saving a fair bit of desktop real-estate thanks to its unusual design. As such the company went back to the drawing board and made FT03-mini. The interesting thing here is that most of the structural design is shared with the SG05, but with a set of four thick aluminium panels fitted to it and then put on its short end.
This allowed SilverStone to save a fair bit of money in terms of tooling for the chassis, something which usually is the most expensive thing when building a chassis. Some changes were made, such as rotating the optical drive tray so if faces the right way around, moving around the hard drive bracket slightly and adding a second bracket so that two 2.5-inch drives as well as one 3.5-inch drive can be fitted internally. At the bottom of the chassis a 140mm AP141 fan was fitted to help cool the entire system and SilverStone told us that they have made sure that there's enough space for even a full-length graphics card inside the FT03-mini.
One of the drawbacks of the FT03-mini over the SG05 is the fact that you can no longer use a standard ATX PSU, instead an SFX form factor PSU has to be used. These are generally not available at very high Wattage ratings though, but we have a feeling that SilverStone will offer its own version for the FT03-mini. A pair of USB 3.0 ports were added to the top of the chassis and this is also where you'll find a pair of audio jacks and the power and reset buttons. The FT03-mini is so far the most interesting mini-ITX chassis we've seen at CeBIT and unlike the original FT03 it looks far less complicated to build.
Read more: SilverStone shrinks the FT03, simply calls it the FT03-mini by VR-Zone.com
SilverStone shrinks the FT03, simply calls it the FT03-mini
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