You don’t have to have lived through a certain era to be a fan of it, but the best retro vibes one can experience are with those that spark the memories you have of those times. If you’ve been a PC enthusiast for as long as I have, then you’ll probably look at SilverStone’s new full-tower case with a warm heart and happy, fuzzy feelings.
That’s because the SST-FLP02 is as close to a PC case from the late 1980s, early 1990s, as you could possibly get, without trawling through eBay to source a genuine one. We first laid eyes on it back in May, at the annual Computex event, but it’s now officially on the market, with an asking price of $240.
I know that’s a lot of money to spend on a case, but to be fair to SilverStone, it’s a niche product that isn’t going to shift in enormous quantities. Low-volume sellers nearly always sport high price tags to make them financially viable for the manufacturer. So what exactly are you getting for your two hundred and forty dollars?
Internally, it’s pretty much a standard full-tower case, with room for a 360 mm radiator at the top and space for graphics cards no longer than 386 mm. It comes with two 120 mm fans installed at the front, below the row of buttons in the middle, plus another one at the rear. It’s probably not going to win any awards for airflow, though, as the PSU shroud at the bottom is very long.
What it will win at is tugging the heartstrings of PC enthusiasts who remember building rigs in very similar cases, a great many decades ago. You get a nice big red power switch (no push button to power up your rig here), followed by a physical lock to disable the power and reset switches, as well as a famous (infamous?) Turbo button.
Originally, this was used to force CPUs to run slower (yes, I know, very confusing). Intel’s processors of the late 1980s, such as the 80486, were speedy beasts, but many apps at the time didn’t like that raw clock speed so much. Hitting the turbo button dropped the chip’s clock speed right down, making the whole system compatible with older games and programs.
In the case of the SST-FLP02, though, the turbo button boosts the fans to their maximum rpm (kinda the opposite of what it did, I guess). I reckon it would be more useful if it could be used to cycle through some predefined fan speeds, instead of going straight to all-hell-breaking-loose mode. The little LED display next to the turbo button displays the fan’s rpm (0 to 100%), if you were wondering.
At the top of the front of the case, there are four fake 5.25-inch floppy drives. It’s just a door that opens up, but behind it are three real 5.25-inch drive bays. So if you’ve been hankering for a case that lets you install a couple of optical disk burners or a raft of hot-swappable storage drives, then the SST-FLP02 might just be the case for you.
Naturally, the whole thing is beige in colour, because that was the only choice you had back then. In fact, if it weren’t for the likes of Apple and its ‘DayGlo’ original iMac, we might still be toting monochromatic machines even now. Oh, wait a second, we do. It’s just that they’re black or white, with glass everywhere.
I have to confess that if I were looking to build a one-off special PC, I’d seriously consider using SilverStone’s blast from the past. It would make for an awesome sleeper build, though I dare say jamming an RTX 5090 inside one of these might cause a few problems pertaining to heat. That turbo button would certainly get a workout or two.
