Retro beige PC case goes from April Fools’ joke to retail — SilverStone’s sleeper PC with modern internals ships in Q1 2025

Cases, cooling, and power specialist SilverStone has announced that a desktop PC case that it previously showed off as an April Fools’ joke is heading to retail. An unashamedly beige SilverStone FLP01 pre-built system was on display earlier in the week at the firm’s Japan Expo. Japanese tech media reports that FLP01 cases will be released sometime in Q1 2025 priced at JPY 19,800 (~$130).

Some of us tech old-timers started on systems that look a lot like SilverStone’s new FLP01. This particular design is said to have been strongly influenced by the NEC PC-9800 series, which was popular in Japan. The desktop form factor doubles as a monitor stand and puts the swapping of essential floppy and CD media within easy reach.

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Looking more closely at the not-shiny new FLP01, the front has a couple of faux 5.25-inch floppy drives to the right. Sadly, they look fake, even from a distance, with the filled-in slots and single-color plastics. However, these two artifices flip open to reveal an optical drive (upper slot) and front I/O array including headphones, USB-A, and USB-C ports (lower slot). A power button, plus disk activity and power LEDs appear to be present on the left front side of the desktop case. You can see these details in a series of images shared by ascii.jp.

At the expo, SilverStone had an FLP01 system configured with some powerful modern components, presumably to show its flexibility and capacity. It packed in a full-sized ATX motherboard, full-size PSU, water cooling, Intel Core Ultra 7 265K CPU, and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti GPU, as well as buckets of storage. Plenty of room seemed to be left for bigger GPUs than the Asus Dual model featured, up to a maximum of 300mm in length. CPU coolers up to 138mm tall can fit in. The demo system was configured with three intake fans (two on the left, one on the right) venting from the back and top.

Other details we gleaned about this case were that it measures 440mm x 362mm, and is 170mm tall. Apparently, some slight cosmetic changes will be made to this prototype, to make it a closer tribute to the aforementioned NEC PC-9800.

Hopefully, this, or a similar beige retro tribute case from SilverStone, will be made available outside of the Japanese market. Features and pricing aren’t bad if you are on the lookout for an easy sleeper PC build.