Interior

Thanks to the tempered glass panel being mounted to a metal hinge mechanism at the bottom, it only needs two thumbscrews to keep it secured – a considerable improvement over the de facto design where you have to align four holes. The opposite side panel is held in place with the usual pair of thumbscrews, and again the quality of the metal here is really impressive – it’s a nice solid lump of side panel.

With its fixed metal PSU shroud, the PM02 has a very clean internal design. The side-facing section of the shroud proudly sports the SilverStone logo, while the upper fascia has its smooth finish spoiled only by a set of rivets towards the front, which are used to hold the HDD cage beneath in place. It’s a minor niggle, but it’s still a shame this couldn’t be achieved without using these rivets.

The front of the PSU shroud is cut away to make room for radiators; there’s 48mm of room behind the front row of fans, which should cover the vast majority of 360mm and 280mm all-in-one solutions available. The roof can also accommodate slimline radiators, this time 280mm and 240mm models.

Motherboard standoffs do not come pre-installed in this chassis, but this is hardly a pressing matter. What is more annoying, however, is the bracket that SilverStone has used to keep expansion cards locked in place. Once you remove it, it’s very easy for every slot cover to just fall out, since they aren’t individually secured. This adds an unnecessary frustration to the usually painless GPU installation procedure.

Moving to the other side, the power supply doesn’t have any rubber or foam to sit on, and length is limited to 190mm on account of the non-removable HDD cage, although this is still a fair bit of room, even for high-wattage models.

The HDD cage itself is a three-bay one, and each bay has its own 3.5”/2.5”-compatible plastic tray with tool-free locking. Larger drives can be fitted without tools by bending the trays and aligning the mounting pins, which have little rubber bits around them to absorb vibrations.

A further three SSDs can be installed using the dedicated, vertically stacked plastic trays towards the front. These have a handy spring mechanism that allows them to flip outwards to an angle that lets you insert the SSD without actually having to remove the tray itself. Once done, you simply push it closed to lock it back in place.

The PM02 is, for the most part, strong when it comes to cable routing. There certainly aren’t any glaring issues, as the motherboard is served by holes above, below, and to the side of it (the latter ones come with rubber grommets too), and you get a couple of Velcro cable ties on the rear of the tray as well as a healthy selection of anchor points. Even so, it could do with a hole or two for routing the front fan cables, and there’s a little more length on display for some of the lower motherboard connectors than we’d like. You also don’t get a dedicated hole for PCIe cables like with some PSU shrouds.