SilverStone's new beige retro gaming PC case looks perfect for a sleeper build

SilverStone has just unveiled another retro gaming PC case, but rather than sitting flat on your desk, this one is a full tower, complete with a stack of 5.25-inch drive bays. Plus, in a nod to the old beige boxes from the 486 era, it even has a turbo button, and this time it actually does what you'd expect. It almost makes me want to build a new AMD K6 rig with a 3dfx Voodoo card in it.

Despite its retro styling, the new SilverStone FLP02 has plenty in common with the chassis featured on our guide to buying the best PC case today, including a shroud that hides the PSU, cable routing holes around the motherboard tray, and 2.5-inch SSD drive bays behind it. Whether you want to build a retro gaming PC based on old gear or assemble a sleeper PC with the latest GPU inside it, SilverStone's new case has nailed the look of the era.

I'm not particularly keen on the mock 5.25-inch floppy drive-style bay covers, as they look plasticky and clearly fake, but it's great to see genuine drive bay mounts behind them, where you could fit a DVD drive, a floppy drive, and even a Sound Blaster Live! I/O box.

The bottom bay also contains a neat nod to the past, with a dual-digit segmented display of the kind that previously showed your clock speed on a Pentium rig, but in this case shows your PWM fans' duty cycle as a percentage, basically showing how much power is applied to them (and therefore how fast they're running) compared to the maximum power.

There's also a big red power switch, as well as a lock for the power and reset buttons (just like an old-school removable hard drive caddy), and the aforementioned turbo button. The latter was a bit of a misnomer in PCs from the 1990s, as pressing it slowed down the CPU, rather than speeding it up. This one, however, maxes out all your PWM fans so they're running at full speed, potentially enabling your CPU to boost to a higher sustained clock speed.

You could genuinely build a high-end new PC in the case too, with support for a massive 360mm radiator in the roof, giving you room to fit the best CPU cooler you can afford in it. There's also a massive 386mm of clearance directly under the drive bays to install a massive graphics card, enabling you to even install an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 in it - a colossal upgrade from the 3dfx Voodoo card you might have installed in a case looking like this one in the 90s.

This is the company's second recent PC case with retro styling, with the previous SilverStone FLP01 having a desktop-style design, where it sits flat on your desk and you mount your monitor on top of it. There's clearly a growing market for PC builders who still have some affection for the days of multiple drive bays, beige color schemes, and turbo buttons, but as someone who's old enough to remember that era, I'm glad to see the back of it - give me one of today's black or gray cases with a tempered glass panel and a stylish wooden front any day (yes, I'm talking about you, Fractal North).

If you love to remember the early days of the PC, check out my full feature on the Nvidia GeForce 256, as well as my article on the IBM PC 5150, where I went back to IBM to find out how it all began.

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