A Closer Look

Taking a closer look at the Commander ESA Edition, it is made of steel, while the front is constructed of thick aluminum. Silverstone has decided to give it a little designer's touch with a straight groove going down the center of the front. While this certainly looks nice, there is simply no case of the company out there, which has the same design. It may have been better to go with a clean, straight front, and possibly go with a bit of a backlight on the front logos, instead of this design.


You will find the Silverstone logo on the top left and the Commander branding on the bottom right on the front. As this is the "ESA Edition", there could be a generic offering, which does not require an NVIDIA mainboard, in the future as well. I guess, only time will tell.


The PCB within the Commander is black and has a very clean and easily understandable design. All types of connectors are grouped. Three lighting units (LED or CCFL) can be connected all the way to the left of the PCB, four connectors for the case fans are lined up up top and four thermal sensors can be plugged in under the Molex power connector. Even if you are not aware of what belongs to what, there are clear labels next to every connection.


There are two ICs on the PCB. Even though these are quite small, they are the only ones to be found. This is where the ESA magic happens. The small SILABS F321 is part of the full speed USB, 16k ISP FLASH MCU family from Silicon Labs. Their specification sheet holds a nice quote:

With on-chip Power-On Reset, VDD monitor, Voltage Regulator, Watchdog Timer, and clock oscillator,C8051F320/1 devices are truly stand-alone System-on-a-Chip solutions. The FLASH memory can be reprogrammed in-circuit, providing non-volatile data storage, and also allowing field upgrades of the 8051 firmware. User software has complete control of all peripherals, and may individually shut down any or all peripherals for power savings.

The second is the ULN2003AG, which is simply a seven darlington array. This part is only responsible for power distribution.