We can’t pick a date for when it became popular for DIY desktop PC builders to shove their proud creations under their desks. But it’s so common a practice nowadays that most mid-tower PC cases now have their front-panel ports on top. To buck that trend, sometimes today the main objective of a PC build is simply to bring the desktop back to the top of your desk. SilverStone is ready to help with an unusually designed chassis, the Alta G1M ($180), that’s about half the depth of the typical tower and should fit on even a college-dorm-sized desk. It doesn’t run particularly cool or quiet, but it lets you cram a lot of PC (including a full-size graphics card and even liquid cooling) into a very, very tight footprint.
The Design: Liquid Fortification
Available in white or black, the Alta G1M stands apart from cube-shaped cases by having enough space for a large liquid cooling system, as evidenced by the single vented side panel. You may notice that the vents are on the right rather than left side of the chassis. That’s the first indication that something unusual is afoot.
You’ll also see that the front-panel ports are placed in an ideal location if you put the PC on a desk, and that they include only a single audio jack—a combo jack that fits headsets with a single four-barrel connector, placed below two USB 3.x Type-A ports and a USB 3.2 Gen 2-spec Type-C port. Splitter cables are available for those of us whose favorite headsets require separate headphone and microphone jacks, but SilverStone doesn’t include one with the case.
Looking around back reveals nothing but a power socket and cable passage, rather than a bunch of slots and a hole for an I/O panel. And pulling the exterior panel exposes only a pair of 120mm fan mounts above a vertical mount for a space-saving SFX or SFX-L power supply.
It’s not until you open things up that the 90-degree-rotated-motherboard design starts to make sense, with four PCI Express slot covers visible below the top panel. The Alta G1M uses the same I/O-on-top concept that debuted in SilverStone’s popular, funky Fortress FT02 chassis about a dozen years ago, here compressed to MicroATX proportions.
That means the rear cable passage mentioned a couple of paragraphs ago is the route for all I/O cables, including graphics. You’d better not need an adapter block plugged in here, because adding one would prevent the top cover from fitting.
The removable bracket that runs down the inside of the right-side panel is designed to hold up to three 120mm fans or two drives, and the rear panel is drilled to hold either two 120mm fans or two additional drives (in either 3.5-inch or 2.5-inch form factors). There’s enough space behind the removable bracket to put a 360mm (3x120mm) radiator behind those fans, while leaving the bracket out entirely allows installation of CPU air coolers with mounting height up to 159mm.
Dust-prevention features includes a slide-out filter for the Alta G1M’s stock 180mm-by-32mm bottom-mounted intake fan, and a magnetic sheet filter for the right-side panel.
The black rear-panel mesh is a slightly more cumbersome tab-secured sheet, while the white top- and bottom-panel mesh is captured between plastic frames and metal covers that use folded-over tabs. You’ll want to clean the latter with compressed air.
Building in the Alta G1M
Cable connections are minimized to Gen 2 and Gen 1 USB 3 connectors, the usual front-panel button and LED group, a pass-through cable for the vertically mounted power supply, and a standard-issue front-panel HD audio connector.
The Alta G1M comes with enough screws to secure all the optional drives and mandatory parts (motherboard and power supply), along with a bundle of ratcheting cable ties.
The easiest way to illustrate component placement is to tilt the radiator mount out of the finished build, so we did just that:
Vents on both the side and front panel appear ideal for showing off the lighted fans of a liquid cooling system and an RGB-equipped graphics card, but our test components didn’t have that kind of bling on them, as you can see above.
Here’s a look at what the top of the Alta G1M looks like with the system filled and cover panel removed:
SilverStone uses a magnetic attachment scheme for the cover here, since its designers understand that this will be the most frequently removed part due to the need for access to the I/O cables.
Testing the Alta G1M: Thermal and Noise Results
A new test motherboard, the ROG Maximus XI Gene, makes its appearance in this review for the first time in our test regimen, since the smaller Mini-ITX board we’ve used with Mini-ITX cases wouldn’t fill this MicroATX case appropriately. Fortunately, our usual Corsair iCUE H100i RGB Pro XT cooler and FSP Dagger Pro 850-watt power supply have fit all of our most recent test configurations.
Our comparison systems here will be the SilverStone Seta Q1 (a silence-minded small tower being reviewed alongside the Alta) and the Mini-ITX Lian Li A4-H2O we recently tested. Comparing the closed and open system temperatures shows that the Alta G1M has trouble exhausting all that heat when the radiator fans, the bottom fan, and the PSU fan all blow inward. Unfortunately, the tubing of our liquid cooler is pressed tightly in a couple of places against the radiator, so the tubing would have stopped the fans from turning if we had put the fans on the inside blowing out.
One would think that all the vents above the voltage regulator would have let a significant amount of heat out, but our system went from best temperatures to worst temperatures when buttoned up. Perhaps the white mesh of the decorative top panel is a bit restrictive.
The face panel also uses white mesh, and it’s the one that covers the graphics card. Since the difference between open and closed case readings is more than 12 degrees in this area, we tried blowing some air through the face panel and found very little restriction. Color us baffled.
For all the heat-holding impact those exterior panels had on temperature, they didn’t do much at containing noise:
We found a difference of less than 1db between open and closed configurations.
What Matters More: Saving Space or Top Performance?
So the Alta G1M’s temperatures and open-chassis-style noise levels are definitely not high points. We do, however, appreciate the Alta’s aesthetics, and we could easily see a space-strapped PC builder using it (with cooler-running hardware) on top of a desk. Performance versus convenience is always a matter of personal priorities.
After all, not all of us are gamers, crypto miners, or 3D model creators, and many of us will never see 100% CPU or GPU utilization levels, let alone both at the same time. While we can’t call the Alta G1M’s performance a win, we can admit that most users will have their fans set to default values (with automatic speed regulation) and use applications that will under-stress their hardware, thereby avoiding the thermal and acoustic negatives we saw in our testing.
SilverStone’s Alta G1M emphasizes convenience and a small footprint ahead of raw performance, and we’re sure that many users will like that just fine. That’s cool, or at least cool enough; just know what you’re getting when you elevate your PC with this case.
