The best retro-tech trends remind us of a simpler time without forcing us to relive that time’s teeth-gnashing. SilverStone seizes on that idea with its “modern retro” FLP02 PC case, the second in a series of beige-box SilverStone chassis with 21st-century innards. A computer that looked something like this might have been the first one you upgraded with a CD-ROM drive, a Pentium MMX CPU, and 3dfx Voodoo graphics, while grabbing a magnifying glass to deal with the motherboard jumpers. None of that here: With the FLP02, you get modern conveniences and a classic vibe without the pain. It’s not without flaws, but it’s 100% fun and falls short of an Editors' Choice award only because SilverStone's pricing ($239.99 MSRP) is rather high for what it is.

Design: Take Me Back to 1997, But Make It Modern

Let's start with the two-digit LED readout on the front panel. Do you need it? Of course not. It’s linked to a PWM fan hub and shows the unit’s duty cycle (power proportion) for values below 100% and “HH” for full speed. Next to it are a Turbo button that simply overrides the PWM input signal to make connected fans operate at 100%, plus a Reset button, a key lock, and a red power button. Power, drive activity, and Turbo LEDs are lined up along the top of the same panel.

The power button looks like a switch, but, being momentary-contact, always appears to be in the “off” position when it's not being depressed. The key locks out the power and reset buttons, even when the system is on, making it ideal for homes with young children, to prevent them from powering off or resetting power to your machine from the front panel. (Some old-school front-panel features are worth saving, not just as conversation pieces.)

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

A hinged panel at the top of the front face conceals the non-vintage Type-C USB port, the headset (headphone/microphone combo) jack, and two USB 3.x ports. The USB ports are color-coded black, as USB 2.0, in keeping with the theme. The door is magnetically latched.

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

A look around the back is an easy tip-off that this is anything but a 1990s model, as models of that era glowed with the silvery light of unpainted steel in areas like the back panel and slot covers. Other less-than-vintage features include the bridgeless expansion panel and the incision of 140mm fan mounts. 

Vertically oriented PCI Express slots were not really a thing yet, either, though they quickly became one as people sought more space to break out their onboard connectors. As motherboard makers added front-panel ports faster than case companies could accommodate, nothing is more 1990s than a slot panel filled with port-breakout plates!

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

Bottom-mounted power supplies were an uncommon but real option in the theme’s period. That said, we can’t recall if any had such a handy slide-out dust filter covering the air inlet as the one we pulled from under the FLP02.

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

The top and front panels also feature filter mesh, though only the top panel’s filter can be removed from its panel. (The front panel’s mesh is glued on...boo.) Removing the top panel’s filter is way easier: squeeze both of its rear corner tabs toward the center and slide it backward. It takes strong, pointy fingers.

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

Front fans are jammed tightly beneath the lowest 5.25-inch bay, leaving no room for the end caps of a 240mm-format radiator, even though a gap in the modern power supply shroud would have accommodated the added thickness.

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

Can the FLP02 work with EATX boards? It's complicated. The case has all the necessary mounting points to hold a 13-inch-deep motherboard. Using all those mounts, though, requires removing the inner panel from the 5.25-inch bays. There’s still enough room for an SSI-CEB board, though its 10.5-inch depth sacrifices access to the two rubber cable-passage holes behind its front edge. If you’re going through all that effort, we might as well include compatibility for the enthusiast-class 10.6-inch and 10.7-inch motherboards (even though they get the same “EATX” label as their non-fitting 13-inch kin of the same name).

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

Graphics cards up to 279mm long fit directly. Ours did not, so we removed the upper 3.5-inch drive tray to expand that space to approximately 380mm.

The only good way we can think of to make those drive trays sit square would be to mount a large chunk of machined aluminum in them...you know, an actual 3.5-inch hard drive. Above these, we see the FLP02’s powered PWM hub mounted to the back of its 5.25-inch front-panel bay device, and behind these, we see its adjustable graphics card brace.

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

Moving up, we can see that the upper 5.25-inch drive bay is notched to support extended (280mm and 360mm format) radiators. The mounting kit includes a spacer to restore the bay’s functionality, but using it reduces radiator compatibility to 240mm.

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

The front bay covers, which resemble the faces of 5.25-inch floppy drives, have a functional flip lever that operates the removal latch on one side. While it’s a nicely executed effort, our greatest logical concern is that we remember being unable to close the latch on our 5.25-inch drives unless a floppy disk was inserted. (Authenticity builds nostalgia, no?)

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

When SilverStone says the FLP02 has only three 5.25-inch external bays, and we say four (one of which is filled), it’s because the front-panel bay device (which houses the LED readout and the front ports) can be moved. Were you to add your own power button, you could even remove the thing entirely. We think it should stay, though we wish its designer had found a purpose for the giant empty space in its center.

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

The hidden side of the chassis looks nothing but modern, as its pair of 2.5-inch drive trays, below the CPU-cooler cutout, wouldn’t appear in a desktop until post-Y2K. (Earlier builds required 3.5-to-2.5-inch bay adapters to hold what, back then, we called “laptop drives.”)

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

A removable cage at the front of the power supply bay is designed to hold two 3.5-inch hard drives on vibration-damping rubber grommets and shoulder screws. Above it, we can see that each of the motherboard compartment’s two drive trays has two rubber-sleeved mounting pins and a security screw that sticks through the back of the motherboard tray.

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

Building With the SilverStone FLP02

The FLP02 includes a stuffed little accessory kit, including a PWM fan extension cable to connect its fan hub and a spacer to fit 5.25-inch devices in the case’s top bay. Screws abound: four power supply screws, two #102 keys, 16 short M3 screws for attaching up to four 2.5-inch drives, eight #6-32 shoulder screws for installing two 3.5-inch drives in the lower cage, 22 longer M3 screws for installing the motherboard and 5.25-inch drives, and 10 #6-32 panhead screws for installing 3.5-inch drives into the motherboard compartment’s two drive trays. You also get a #2 Phillips-head socket for standoffs, four extra motherboard standoffs, and five zip ties.

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

The FLP02 connects to our motherboard using HD Audio for the headset jack, a Gen 2x2 cable for the Type-C port, and a Gen 1 cable for the two Type-A ports. Meanwhile, its front bay device connects using a 4-pin PWM connector to one of our board’s fan headers and a combined F_PANEL block that plugs into our motherboard’s power/reset/LED group.

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

A Serial ATA power cable from our power supply juices up the FLP02’s fan hub, and the hub in turn powers the front-mounted alphanumeric display.

The top of the FLP02’s power supply shroud provides six holes to adjust the inward bias of its card brace; the brace is secured with four screws to keep it vertical. Moving it all the way to the inside row of screw holes (to fit our card) reduced the number of available mounting points to two. Loosening the screw on its outward-facing side allows both the upper and lower pinch brackets to slide freely, so that squeezing the brackets against our card’s upper and lower shrouds allowed us to tighten it in a secure position. The result: No card sag.

As previously mentioned, fitting our 12-inch-long graphics card required removing one of the area’s two internal drive trays, as shown below.

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

One of the more disappointing tiny details we alluded to earlier: The power button, designed to resemble a rocker switch, appears to be in the “off” position regardless of whether the PC is running. That choice makes even less sense when we consider that most AT-style power supplies were equipped with push-on/push-off clicky power buttons, so that switching an AT/ATX convertible case to the later standard required both a new power supply and a momentary-contact replacement power button. The way it’s implemented here looks good, but it doesn’t make much sense in the past or the present.

On the other hand, the 1-inch-by-1-inch case badge is a nice touch, as it’s the same size as the legacy badges that some old-school PC builders have collected. Here’s how the whole 1990s aesthetic goes with our mid-2020s parts...

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

Testing the SilverStone FLP02

We used the following hardware configuration to run our FLP02 sample through its paces...

Rather than dash the aesthetically oriented FLP02 against our strongest-performance candidates, we chose a few designer models for today’s performance evaluation. (That includes the mirror-clad InWin Prism and the modular Cooler Master MasterFrame 600.) That only helped a little, though, as even the InWin Prism, no thermal champ, produced cooler temperatures.

Since dust filters aren’t really useful mounted over exhaust fans, we removed the top panel’s dust filter to see whether increased airflow through our updraft radiator configuration might elevate the FLP02’s thermal performance. This cooled the CPU by 2 degrees C, pushing the FLP02 from dead last to a last-place tie with the fifth-place performer.

Anyone who isn’t going to apply so heavy a load to their CPUs as our testing does will certainly focus on the case’s noise containment instead. The FLP02 does very well here, tying with the quiet-running Tryx Luca L70 for first place on average.

Since our high temperature was due to excessive thermal loads that not all users will face, we wouldn’t rule out the SilverStone FLP02 for a retro build. It’s competing aesthetically not against the cases charted here, but against true vintage cases that were never designed to flow as much air, and/or heavily modified vintage cases that require skill to make work.

Completing the Vintage Facade

Beige has never been a consistent color, and PC towers that started out that shade back in the day rarely stayed that way. If you’re of a certain age, you might remember seeing complete office machines turn tan on the window-facing side if they sat on that same desk for more than a few months.

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

The above drives came from a smoke-free environment (a state office), yet the DVD-ROM’s face is discolored to the point of resembling the tar of cigarette smoke. (Note that the edges are still light beige.) The Zip Drive seems a better match for the FLP02, since its 5.25-inch bay adapter was only lightly sunburned, but installing it would require an Ultra ATA-to-Serial ATA adapter (the little box in the foreground).

That particular optical drive wouldn’t fit, anyway: The FLP02 provides slightly less than 8.1 inches in front of the board, and that drive was slightly more than 8.1 inches long. Moving it to the top bay might work for some, but it wouldn’t work in our configuration unless we wanted to remove our 240mm CPU cooler. Plan accordingly!

(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)

Not willing to completely give up on filling the front, we remembered that black-on-beige was a theme as far back as the 1980s before installing black optical and RAM drives in the two remaining positions, below the Zip Drive.