News SilverStone reveals the FLP02 late-80s style tower PC case — proudly beige but thoroughly modern inside

[Admin]

SilverStone’s FLP02 late-80s era tower PC case looks ancient but supports massive modern GPUs, up to 360mm AiO CPU coolers, and has a Turbo button fan controller display.

SilverStone reveals the FLP02 late-80s style tower PC case — proudly beige but thoroughly modern inside : Read more

 

[thestryker]

It'll be interesting to see how many people are nostalgic about this type of thing. I still have an actual case from the era this is representing as the first server box I ever built is still in storage. I certainly wouldn't want one of these sitting on or under a desk though.

Ironically I liked the desktop one a bit more, but part of that is due to there not being many desktop style cases period anymore.

 

[bit_user]

It'll be interesting to see how many people are nostalgic about this type of thing.

It would be a very ironic case to have in some high-profile location, where people would expect to see a high-spec PC. Would be a great attention-grabber.

I still have an actual case from the era this is representing as the first server box I ever built is still in storage. I certainly wouldn't want one of these sitting on or under a desk though.

Yeah, using an actual box of this vintage would cause all sorts of practical problems, starting with the AT form factor. You can probably find some new enough to support ATX. The next problem would be airflow.

 

[thestryker]

It would be a very ironic case to have in some high-profile location, where people would expect to see a high-spec PC. Would be a great attention-grabber.

When I linked it to a friend their first response was "could you imagine taking this to a LAN party?" 🤣

Yeah, using an actual box of this vintage would cause all sorts of practical problems, starting with the AT form factor. You can probably find some new enough to support ATX. The next problem would be airflow.

The one I have is ATX, and I definitely cut out a hole in the side where the expansion cards are and mounted a fan. I think it has a single fan in the front, but I'm not actually sure there's ventilation and if there is it's awful by today's standards.

It's tucked deep in a closet, but the one case I'll never get rid of is my Cooler Master Wave Master. I love the design so much and it was the first case I spent big money on (I think it was around $150). After I retired it from my main system for something with good airflow I used it as a multimedia system and if I ever put together a system for that again I'll pull it out.

 

[snemarch]

While this one is a bit too retro-looking for my tastes, I do really miss 5.25" bays and side panels that aren't tempered glass...

 

[TerryLaze]

The "flop too" seriously?!
Why not just call it the 6000 sux right away.

 

[Findecanor]

The fake 5¼" bays just annoy me. I hope that there are blank face plates available.

The plastic has a translucent quality to it that makes it feel cheap, and which the plastics back in the day did not have.

 

[Penzi]

I’m a sucker for the horizontal layout of the FLP01.

I’ll probably build something more akin to what Optimum Tech regularly builds: tiny gaming powerhouses.

Still, nostalgia happened. Thanks SilverStone!

 

[Stevemeister]

I think this colour should be called Boomer Beige.

 

[artk2219]

I’m a sucker for the horizontal layout of the FLP01.

I’ll probably build something more akin to what Optimum Tech regularly builds: tiny gaming powerhouses.

Still, nostalgia happened. Thanks SilverStone!

Im currently using a Cooler Master HAF XB EVO, and its been a great case for the past 10 years. But if the FLP01 was available in black, id be all over that lol.

 

[bit_user]

The fake 5¼" bays just annoy me.

You can replace them with real 5.25" drives for cheap!

The plastic has a translucent quality to it that makes it feel cheap, and which the plastics back in the day did not have.

Yeah, but I wonder if it yellows as badly as some of the plastic on old cases.

 

[ejolson]

Some cases are covered with branding, some by fake wood, others look like weird shaped lumps of plastic from a toy store. It's surprisingly difficult to find a case that doesn't look childish.

At the same time, I don't see buying something that looks like it came from a thrift store.

 

[COLGeek]

That is "bad" nostalgia there, my friends. No, thank you.

 

[bit_user]

Some cases are covered with branding, some by fake wood, others look like weird shaped lumps of plastic from a toy store. It's surprisingly difficult to find a case that doesn't look childish.

I get that, but I'd say keep looking. It's near impossible to find a case without a logo of some sort, but there are some cases out there that are more understated.

In the past, I've found it helpful to browse Newegg's case selection, which provides numerous filters to help narrow down what you're looking for.

https://www.newegg.com/Computer-Cases/SubCategory/ID-7
​

PCPartPicker.com is another great resource, although many of the cases in their database are no longer in production.

https://pcpartpicker.com/products/case/

I'm very picky and have spent inordinate amounts of time shopping for cases. I've always managed to find something that meets my criteria and that I've been pretty happy with (although sometimes it's involved swapping out LED fans for non-LED ones, etc.). There are quite a lot of options out there. Sadly, some good styles have gone out of fashion, but there's probably about as much selection now as there ever was.

 

[abufrejoval]

I am really tempted, even if that price tag puts me off somewhat. What better way to hide a high-end workstation in plain sight than a system that looks like some crappy leftover. You'd mostly have to worry about some overeager janitor taking it out the back as trash!

And then it also would have to be sturdy, like my old Chieftec cases, which could easily do double duty as a seat or table support. Some of those have been in the family for more than two decades and struggle a bit with ventilation above 500 Watts of aggregate power consumption.

Most of my home-lab workstations still need 5 1/4" bays, either because I have RAIDed 3.5" HDDs with vibe-fixers in them, and/or because they house 4-8x SATA-SSD drive cages, and a mix of caddy-less 2.5" + 3.5" SATA hot-swap bays.

That's because I have tons of 1-4TB SATA SSDs that I don't just want to throw away, but combine into RAID-0 "warm data" caches in addition to on-board NVMes for the "hot data" and because I use hot swap large helium disks as a tape replacement for external backups.

My biggest gripe with NVMe is that it's not nearly as handy and flexible as SATA SSDs in caddy-less hot-swap bays used to be when it comes to playing with operating systems, a significant part of what I do, if it's not just VMs.

Anyhow, getting something with 3-4 5 1/4" bays open to the front and sufficent bottom-front to top-back blower surface for the likes of an RTX 4090 is getting quite hard: far too much emphasis on bling, nearly none on practicality and sturdiness.

I used to have an IBM sticker that I peeled off some 370 mainframe ages ago and religiously applied to every new PC tower case I had as primary. Don't know where that went... but these days nobody even remembers what a 370 was nor would they be awed by virtual machine capability.

I use geizhals to filter for PC cases, because their database filters are very exhaustive and precise and lead you to the best deals with constantly updated prices... in the EU.

 

[bit_user]

And then it also would have to be sturdy, like my old Chieftec cases, which could easily do double duty as a seat or table support. Some of those have been in the family for more than two decades and struggle a bit with ventilation above 500 Watts of aggregate power consumption.

At work, we used to buy mid-range and larger Dell Precision workstation towers and those cases I could easily stand on. They weigh a ton, but they're built like tanks.

I used to have an IBM sticker that I peeled off some 370 mainframe ages ago and religiously applied to every new PC tower case I had as primary.

Yeah, I did that same sort of thing, for a while. It was a steel badge off a machine made by a "supercomputing" company I once used to work for.

Every now and then, I feel like it would be cool to have something like the glitzy SGI cases of the 80's and 90's. Those were some of the first blinged-out cases I'd ever seen. Leave it to the Californians...

Anyway, then I come to my senses and realize that I'm much too practical to buy such cases, even if they were available today.

I'm mostly still using black, aluminum, windowless Lian Li cases that are more than a decade old. The exceptions are for mini-PCs, and I had to buy a mid-tower that I wanted to have dust filtration, smallish footprint, full-sized ATX, and optical drive bays. Practically the only case I could find that met such criteria was the lower-tier Fractal Design Focus G. Not that I wouldn't have paid more, but nicer cases were generally larger or lacked dust filters (due to being designed for higher air flow).

Focus G

www.fractal-design.com

The two mini-PC cases are:

• https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09PC1BZ7N (which I have oriented vertically, like a tower)
• https://www.silverstonetek.com/en/product/info/computer-chassis/PT13/

 

[abufrejoval]

It'll be interesting to see how many people are nostalgic about this type of thing. I still have an actual case from the era this is representing as the first server box I ever built is still in storage. I certainly wouldn't want one of these sitting on or under a desk though.

Ironically I liked the desktop one a bit more, but part of that is due to there not being many desktop style cases period anymore.

I'd say my capacity for PC nostalgia is very limited, even with 40 years of building my own on the clock.

I've rather welcomed progress, most of which was quite real, even if some things remained elusive for the longest time like portable and silent follow-me remote screens for those workstation PCs, which were often very noisy with whole generations of hard disks that would develop near unbearably screetching ball bearings and were hardly silent from the start.

Most current PC users may not be able to appreciate the relief in noise, heat and space requirements SSDs brought about compared to RAIDs of Raptor 15k drives! Let alone the constant fear of hurting a spinning disk in a mobile laptop! Even my biggest RTX 4090 workstation only produces rather tolerable white noise at max power these days, but the heat pollution has me break out into a sweat, except in winter: no AC in these parts.

Gathering a bunch of kids at a dinner table with Steam remote gaming streaming to silent notebooks was pretty impressive, alas then came VR and 4k.

I'd say it's only of late that I see regressions piling up higher than progress, Microsoft playing to Fruity Cult tunes and stuffing AI into every orifice being a strong primary annoyance. And while NVMe is a god-sent in terms of speed and space, I'd really rather have similarly quick USB-Sticks under a covered latch for flexibility.

I'm also still waiting for the notebook clamshell that just takes my smartphone as a touch pad and then provides additional screen estate, cooling and battery to a device that beats many lesser PCs in terms of everything from performance to endurance.

Unfortunately, with most of my day in front of dual 42" 4k screens, it doesn't take very long for even the best notebooks to annoy me with their tiny claustrophobic screens. Too bad those XReal glasses were a total flop!

I really can't imagine how I managed to work with those 80x25 text-only screens, which accompanied most of these cases, even if I know I did! Zero nostalgia where that is concerned, more like existential dread those days might ever come back!

 

[abufrejoval]

Every now and then, I feel like it would be cool to have something like the glitzy SGI cases of the 80's and 90's. Those were some of the first blinged-out cases I'd ever seen. Leave it to the Californians...

Nothing ever beat the Cray-1 in terms of cool dual-use-as-furniture design:

Too bad the noise for the freon cooling pumps would have made conversation difficult.

 

[abufrejoval]

Visually Thinking Machines were also rather cool:

 

[bit_user]

Visually Thinking Machines were also rather cool:

I knew people who worked there. The CM-2 was everyone's favorite, even if they'd admit the CM-5 was more practical.

Each of those LEDs on the CM-2 was connected to a single-bit processing element (ostensibly for debugging purposes), of which it had 64k. Rather than program it as a 64k-element array, what most people did was to load some microcode that chained I think 16 of them together, so that the machine worked as a 4k array of 16-bit processors.

And yes, someone did write a Tetris game that you could play via the LEDs on the side.

It would be excellent if Nvidia or someone would create a new machine that was a homage to the CM-2, but I think power & cooling requirements would render it completely impractical. I guess you could just build a LED box and hook it up to a rack located elsewhere.

 

[thestryker]

And while NVMe is a god-sent in terms of speed and space, I'd really rather have similarly quick USB-Sticks under a covered latch for flexibility.

Desktop/workstation computing would have been much better off going U.2 into Ex.S and leaving M.2 for portable devices. A lot more storage capacity, better connectors, better cooling and designed with hot swap.

I'd say my capacity for PC nostalgia is very limited, even with 40 years of building my own on the clock.

I'm only around 25 years of building my own, but I feel the same. About the only thing I miss is the early-mid 2000s aluminum case experiments. It feels like a lot of case design today is just chasing trends and very little trying new things. Silverstone still does some swinging for the fences, but those seem to only be very expensive cases (if the Alta D1 had gone length instead of height I'd have probably spent the money though).