Silverstone Fortress or Lian Li PC-A70 ?

The fortress would be better for cooling, just because of those mahoosive fans.

The PC-A70 is also a really nice case though. hmm...
 
DeadMan said:
The fortress would be better for cooling, just because of those mahoosive fans.
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No doubt it has great CPU cooling because of fan blowing directly into it but rest is more problematic:
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cases/2008/10/20/silverstone-ft01-review/4
Because the top 180mm fan is blowing a large amount of cool air directly down onto the CPU cooler, we see excellent CPU temperatures, and the single 120mm exhaust fan works well with this set up to draw hot air quickly out of the case.
However, the graphics card misses out on much of the cool air from the top 180mm, which is swiftly removed by the 120mm exhaust and because the front 180mm intake is significantly blocked by the large drive cage assembly the GPU performance suffers terribly as a result.
 
Going to be returning my Fortress, due to a couple of issues with it (it is slightly warped and wobbles from corner to corner).

I have decided to increase my case budget now and looking at the following:

CoolerMaster ATCS 840
Lian Li Armorsuit PC-P80

Any opinions on these? Leaning towards the 840, as I'd imagine it will be a fair bit quieter than the P80 and will possibly be easier for cable management too.
 
Also just spotted the Lian Li PC-B70, which seems pretty good value compared to the above two. Anyone have experience of this, or the B71?
 
Faffer said:
CoolerMaster ATCS 840
Lian Li Armorsuit PC-P80

Any opinions on these? Leaning towards the 840, as I'd imagine it will be a fair bit quieter than the P80 and will possibly be easier for cable management too.
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From those my choise would be ATCS:
It has PSU on bottom where it can keep itself cool more easily and case fans do better job in cooling top of the case.
In P80 also intake fans are "sandwiched" between two restrictive meshes directly on both sides of fans and actually using 5.25" bays blocks intake capacity further.
And ATCS's design is definitely easier to keep quiet as far as airborne noise is considered, but vibration wise HDD mounting is plasticky.

As downside while lighter than similar sized steel case it's quite heavy for aluminium case because of slight overengineering.

Faffer said:
Also just spotted the Lian Li PC-B70, which seems pretty good value compared to the above two. Anyone have experience of this, or the B71?
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B70 is basically blinged version of A70/7010 and lacks its mid case fans which keep airflow pointed towards hot components while HDD tray increases size of airflow obstacle inside HDD cage so despite of slightly bigger (and lower pressure) 140mm intake fans I doubt there's any difference in cooling performance. (at least to better direction)
Unlike A71 B71 doesn't have door but has front/outside accessible HDD hot swap bays with acoustically bad plastic mounting.
As good thing they have those support bars in side panels making them more rigid but that Akasa Crapmate mat is acoustically useless (same rules apply here as in room acoustics) while even cheap bitumen mat (or any similar dense mat) adds rigidity and lowers vibrations.

Considering cooling options both also lack ability to have PCI cooling kit

In general I don't see any reasons to go for these more expensive newer version over original A70/71 which are quite cheap for size/features because these newer more fashionable features aren't plain good:
-A7x10-series plastic HDD mounting is acoustically inferior and 7110's door doesn't block direct noise escape path.
-B7x is just more noise leaking and despite of slightly bigger intake fan size other areas of cooling are in disadvantage.
Also SATA backplanes/HDD trays aren't that good for future with 2.5" SSDs while A70/71 mounting can take two SSDs into one bay with adapter.
 
mr_x_plosion said:
Also another negative on the Lian Li is the poor cable management as standard, easily fixed by cutting a few holes I guess but already done for you in the Fortress.

Only problem with the fortress is the silly design on the top fan filter.
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the tray in the lian-li has came with holes in it for ages now

heres a photo of mine i took march last year its probably been revised further since then.
http://snoop1050.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/a71_tray.jpg

lian-li use the same chasis for a few different versions of tower so as they bring out new towers with enhanced features they will use the interchangeable parts in the old cases that are still beeing manufactured.
it wouldnt suprise me if the a70/1 now comes with the tray they use in the b70/71 models
 
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I was locked in a delimma for a while then i took the bullet and bought a Silverstone Raven 01. That looks much better than the fotress in my opinion but its much bigger. i saw both of them in a shop together in London and i bit the bullet and went for the Raven01.

Have you seen the Raven01 OP?

Here's a link just in case.

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17527914&page=171

Post 5111.

I added 2 blue cathode ray's and voila!
 
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