SilverStone is making another 80s-style case, this time a mid-tower

[Shawn Knight]

What just happened? SilverStone struck a chord when it introduced a retro-inspired PC case on X as an April Fools' joke in 2023. The gag went over so well that the case maker decided to put the design into production, and now they're moving forward with another new retro offering.

The SilverStone FLP02 is a modern mid-tower styled after late 80s and early 90s beige boxes, and would be perfect for a sleeper build. Constructed of steel and plastic, the tower supports ATX, micro-ATX, and Mini-ITX boards alongside your standard ATX power supply.

Up front, you will find three 5.25-inch external drive bays complete with dummy floppy covers and a retro-themed front panel port with power, reset, and turbo buttons as well as a lock and a period-correct digital display. Notably, the turbo button controls an integrated fan controller while the key lock disables the power button. A flip-down stealth panel is used to hide modern connectors that would otherwise ruin the retro aesthetic.

The system can accommodate up to two 120mm fans up front, a single 120mm or 140mm fan in the rear, and three 120mm fans / two 140mm fans up top (which can also be used in conjunction with a radiator). The front fan grill is removable and if we had to guess, there could very well be dust filters in place. No word yet on how many fans the system will come with.

As for hardware, the case has a 7+2 expansion slot configuration and even comes with a bracket to provide additional support for long video cards.

SilverStone told Tom's Hardware that the FLP02 will go on sale in the US sometime in the third or fourth quarter priced at $220. That's a little on the steep side, but perhaps it has to do with supply and demand. The company said it has been overrun by demand for the original FLP01, adding that they fully intend to manufacture plenty of this new model to avoid a similar situation.

Image credit: Future

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SilverStone is making another 80s-style case, this time a mid-tower

 

[NumberNine]

$200 for a bundle of terrible airflow decisions. They should have opened up those side vent slots since they're doing a deco face on the front. Instead they made the side vents 70% decorative and are trying to pull air through the faceplate.

Also, why would anyone outside of an industrial setting install 3 floppies in a 486?
Genuine question.

 

[OortCloud]

Nice! Love the turbo button too - takes me right back to my 486 beige tower of power with a Trident VGA card, a Sound Blaster and some of the greatest games ever produced. Monkey Island, XCOM, Tie Fighter, Ultima Underworld, Conflict Freespace, Geoff Crammond F1, Eye of the Beholder etc etc

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Conceptually sound but the execution feels too cluttered.

Should have kept the drive bays clean, maybe hidden some of the front panel connectors behind one of the plates.

It suffers from a bit too much from authenticity vs nostalgia and that "How you remember it, not how it was" vibe.

 

[OortCloud]

Conceptually sound but the execution feels too cluttered.

Should have kept the drive bays clean, maybe hidden some of the front panel connectors behind one of the plates.

It suffers from a bit too much from authenticity vs nostalgia and that "How you remember it, not how it was" vibe.

I agree - too many 5.25 inch drive bays. Hopefully they sell blanking panels so you can have at least one - preferably two - of those as a blank?

 

[fadingfool]

$200 for a bundle of terrible airflow decisions. They should have opened up those side vent slots since they're doing a deco face on the front. Instead they made the side vents 70% decorative and are trying to pull air through the faceplate.

Also, why would anyone outside of an industrial setting install 3 floppies in a 486?
Genuine question.

2 floppies made sense - a high density 5.25 inch (1.2 MB) and a high density 3 inch (1.44MB) - these would normally be compatible with the double density 360KB and 720KB discs (respectively) so only if you required compatability with an older 110KB 5.25 disc could I see a reason for a third drive.

 

[Shirley Dulcey]

2 floppies made sense - a high density 5.25 inch (1.2 MB) and a high density 3 inch (1.44MB) - these would normally be compatible with the double density 360KB and 720KB discs (respectively) so only if you required compatability with an older 110KB 5.25 disc could I see a reason for a third drive.

Disks written on 1.2 MB drives sometimes had compatibility issues with 360K drives, so some people kept one of the old drives in their systems to write discs for use on older PCs. By 1990 we started to see people put CD-ROM drives in those bays. Not to mention that people were using 5.25" hard drives in the 80s, and those had to go into that type of bay as well; most computers of that era didn't have hidden 5.25" hard drive bays, and 3.5" hard drives were not yet common.

3.5" floppies weren't yet common on PCs in the 80s, though of course they were popular on Macs. By the end of the 80s we started to see cases with 3.5" bays for them; adapters to put 3.5" drives into a 5.25" bay were a short-lived stopgap that never was all that popular.

Aside from the retro look, I could see this case being popular with the minority that still likes to put optical drives in their systems. It's hard to find a case that still has a space for one, let alone three!

 

[hwertz]

Disks written on 1.2 MB drives sometimes had compatibility issues with 360K drives, so some people kept one of the old drives in their systems to write discs for use on older PCs. By 1990 we started to see people put CD-ROM drives in those bays. Not to mention that people were using 5.25" hard drives in the 80s, and those had to go into that type of bay as well; most computers of that era didn't have hidden 5.25" hard drive bays, and 3.5" hard drives were not yet common.

3.5" floppies weren't yet common on PCs in the 80s, though of course they were popular on Macs. By the end of the 80s we started to see cases with 3.5" bays for them; adapters to put 3.5" drives into a 5.25" bay were a short-lived stopgap that never was all that popular.

Aside from the retro look, I could see this case being popular with the minority that still likes to put optical drives in their systems. It's hard to find a case that still has a space for one, let alone three!

(For those who want to know "Why?", the 1.2MB floppy drives had a narrower read/write head, one of the ways it could get more data on a disk. So, reading a 360K floppy, it'd place this narrower head mid-track, and read fine. Writing? If you wrote a 360K floppy on a 1.2MB drive, the write head is also narrower, so it'd get the right "track pitch" (distance between tracks) but then write the tracks narrower than a 360K would. Which then made it an utter crap shoot if a 360K drive could actually read that disk back or not.)

I had a 5.25" hard drive! After using Atari 8-bit thorughout the 1980s, my parents got a turbo-XT system.. when that packed up, I bought a 386 motherboard and reused their ST250R 40MB RLL hard drive from the turbo-XT system. I switched from DOS to Linux a bit before Windows 95 came out. I ended up using a bay that they'd clearly intended for a second 5.25" floppy drive to install the 5.25" hard drive.

 

[TheBigT42]

(For those who want to know "Why?", the 1.2MB floppy drives had a narrower read/write head, one of the ways it could get more data on a disk. So, reading a 360K floppy, it'd place this narrower head mid-track, and read fine. Writing? If you wrote a 360K floppy on a 1.2MB drive, the write head is also narrower, so it'd get the right "track pitch" (distance between tracks) but then write the tracks narrower than a 360K would. Which then made it an utter crap shoot if a 360K drive could actually read that disk back or not.)

I had a 5.25" hard drive! After using Atari 8-bit thorughout the 1980s, my parents got a turbo-XT system.. when that packed up, I bought a 386 motherboard and reused their ST250R 40MB RLL hard drive from the turbo-XT system. I switched from DOS to Linux a bit before Windows 95 came out. I ended up using a bay that they'd clearly intended for a second 5.25" floppy drive to install the 5.25" hard drive.

I had a Seagate 30MB MFM Drive (don't remember the model) successfully formatted on a RLL controller. This double the capacity because RLL drives had a higher density.

 

[kinetix]

2 floppies made sense - a high density 5.25 inch (1.2 MB) and a high density 3 inch (1.44MB) - these would normally be compatible with the double density 360KB and 720KB discs (respectively) so only if you required compatability with an older 110KB 5.25 disc could I see a reason for a third drive.

I had a 1.2 MB a 1.44MB and a CD-ROM

 

[Hotlynx16]

My brothers 2024 build is in a case with three slots, 1 floppy, aTape drive back-Up and a Blue-ray drive! My 2023 build has 2 slots, Blu-ray drive and accessory panel with 5 memory slots, 4 high powered USB3 slots, digital readout of 5 volts and amps used on the USB3 slots plus a variable fan controller!