Internal Design
Inside the Silverstone Fortress FT04 we find a full black paint job covering everything from the motherboard tray to the drive cages. The motherboard tray is completely removable once four screws are taken care of.
The tray supports Extended ATX motherboards and comes with four standoffs installed. There is an oversize cut-out in the tray which allows rear access to the motherboard for installation of large aftermarket CPU coolers. Additionally, you will find a number of holes in the tray for cable management.
Silverstone allows to remove virtually every component within the FT04. This means the primary 3.5" hard drive cage can be removed, this requires undoing three screws. The pair of hard drives cages in the bottom of the case can also be removed by undoing those screws under the case that we mentioned earlier.
While you might expect these drive cages to be the same, they are not. The cage that sits to the left under the primary drive cage features a tool-less hot-swap bay. The other doesn't feature the hot-swap adapter, though it can be purchased separately, so it is supported.
Something that might seem odd is the strap at the bottom of these drive cages, its purpose is to act as a pull rope making it easy to pop drives out of the hot-swap bay.
There seems to be a lot of wasted space below the hard drive in each of these cages. The cages themselves stand 50mm tall while 3.5" drives are just 23mm, so what is all that extra room for? Well, underneath each of the 3.5" drives it is possible to install a pair of 2.5" drives, giving the FT04 support for four 2.5" drives total, ideal for those wanting to install an array of SSDs.
The FT04 also features an adjustable CPU cooler holder designed to support large coolers when moving the case, a novel idea that should please those scared about their 1kg heatsink ripping apart their expensive motherboard.
Moving to the top of the case we have the 5.25" drive bays and the power supply mount. Both are enclosed in a steel case which is open at the bottom allowing cables to pass through. The advantage of this design is that is allows a lot of room to hide excess cables while it allows for power supplies of any length to be installed. The downside is it makes getting to the back of the 5.25" bays a little harder than normal.
Factory fitted cooling starts and finishes with the pair of front mounted AP182 180mm intake fans. It is possible to remove these fans and install three 120mm fans allowing for the installation of a 360mm triple-fan radiator. The only optional fan mounts include support for a rear 120mm exhaust fan which seems surprisingly limited.
Silverstone has included a graphics card support arm which works really well. For those installing one or more extra-long graphics cards there's a real risk of the cards bending under their own weight. This placed a lot of strain on the cards' PCB and the PCIe slot. The adjustable graphics card support is designed to alleviate that strain by providing support to the back end of the cards.