I love Dan cases for small loungeroom desktops, but Silverstone make my favourite kit for homelab servers and workstations. The manufacturer made massive waves at Computex 2025 in Taipei this year with their second retro-inspired case, the FLP02. Tom’s Hardware and GamersNexus had the best reviews I saw of it. Dullars spammed comment boxes decrying they “DON’T SEE THE POINT!!one!1!”, which is always a sign you’re onto something good.

As a hopeless retro tragic, I knew I had little choice but to place a preorder a few months ago. It arrived yesterday, and I’m so excited to blog about it I didn’t get time to clean the study or even move the half-assembled IKEA furniture out of the way!

I still can’t believe this exists. No really, my inner child is bouncing up and down so hard he risks breaking something. This is so shockingly the case of my dreams it’s damned near terrifying. This is the box, for a case, in 2025! Yes I know the puritains pointed out that nobody sported three 5.25-inch disk drives, but shut up that’s why.

Let’s get it out of the box:

Having spend the last few weeks trying to rearrange a real 1980s AT clone desktop that weighs as much as a fully-laden house boat, this case is feather light. Sturdy and solid like all Silverstone kit, but light. I can already see they nailed the beige aesthetic and colour, even with all the protective packaging.

Okay, time for the big reveal:

Wowza! Do people say that anymore? Did they ever? This is, in the most unironic tone I can muster, the single best modern computer case I think I’ve ever seen. I adore my Mini-ITX cases, but this thing is HUGE, and BEIGE, and just so damn well executed! I’m floored by the build quality.

Let’s take the protective tape off and see how this fan grill assembly works:

Pretty nice. There are two 120 mm fans in the front, and one in the rear. The front panel pops off and slides down, with a built in dust filter that would be easy to clean. This is an upgrade from my old (but still beloved) Antec 300 which requires the whole front of the case to be popped off to access this.

Moving up the front we can see the hidden panel at the top which pops down for additional IO, and those amazing front buttons that power on the machine and adjust the fan controller speed. The CPU turbo LEDs even report the controller fan speed, which I can’t wait to try.

The only downgrade from the FLP01 is that the fake drive panels don’t pop down anymore, they’re just covers. That’s fine; I fully intend to populate them with a beige LG Blu-ray burner I bought in Japan, a Zip Drive, and 360 KiB TEAC 5.25-drive for imaging and transferring data to old machines.

Looking inside, we see even the interior surfaces have been powdercoated that glorious beige; something most of us didn’t have at the time. You can see the two included 3.5-inch drive trays, and the space for the three 5.25-inch drives (or four if you remove the fan controller). To the left we have seven full-width ISA slots (see what I did there?) and two vertical. It has modern conveniences like rubber side wall grommets for cable management, and a shroud for the power supply. It also has a bracket for sagging GPUs, which can thankfully be removed:

I’m sure the regular PC case reviewers will eventually upload their reviews with far more detail and better lighting than our messy study at present. But what I can do that might be a bit unique is compare it to a real beige tower from the tail end of the era. Here it is alongside the 1999 Dell Dimension 4100:

As you can see, the FLP02 is significantly taller, wider, and deeper. The side “grills” mask the added width the case extends out from those 5.25-inch drive bays. It would absolutely dwarf my HP Brio BA600, Japanese NEC APEX, or even the IBM Aptiva 2199. I think the trade-off in size is worth it for those modern conveniences like cable management, though it’s something to keep in mind if you intend to stand it alongside the machines upon which it was loosely modelled.

In subsequent posts I’ll compare the FLP02 to the FLP01 in internals and design, and share my ideas for the build that will be going into this machine. Right now I can’t decide whether to turn this into my primary workstation, or move my FreeBSD jail and bhyve host into it, or my Alpine Xen box, or live out my dream of building a new NetBSD NVMM test host so I can finally retire the HP Microserver. We’ll see!