Silverstone is known for really pushing the envelope of internal design, and the Fortress line even uses thick aluminum plates for the front and top of the chassis. All this comes at a fairly hefty price well above the $200 mark, so we do expect utmost quality and a perfect fit of all the parts, which was not the case with our review sample. Silverstone does offer exchanging a case that does not manage to adhere to your personal standards in the event that your retail case ends up with the same issues we have encountered, yet having taken a look at a few more cases out there, it really does seem as though we received a bit of a dud in that regard.

Overall, Silverstone managed to infuse the Fortress FT04 with some excellent cooling performance and loads of space for storage drives. It would have been nice if both individual hard-drive bays on the floor came with hot-swap brackets, but only one has hot-swap capability. The same goes for a little extension cable for the CPU power cable as some PSU leads won't be long enough. I would have rather seen the omission of the GPU support beam and the CPU cooler support structure as both do not work too well. But you will find the individual fan controllers, which really come in handy, to balance the noise / performance ratio of the potent Air Penetrator fans out well. Other nice aspects are the removable motherboard tray and well-placed sound dampening materials, and loads of space for 3.5"/2.5" drives. In the end, the biggest selling point for the Fortress FT04 is its thermal setup—all of you really wanting to keep temperatures to a minimum or planning on using a single 360 mm radiator: this case is for you. The materials used and the level of engineering does warrant such a price, but the question of whether one really needs thick slabs of aluminum in both the front and top remains. The Silverstone Raven RV04 offers the same case interior, simpler fan controllers, and no aluminum or sound dampening for a whooping $90 less, which can then be spent on better hardware instead. The choice is yours.