SilverStone ML07 review

The SilverStone ML07 is a fairly compact PC chassis designed to house a Mini-ITX motherboard, an SFX power supply and a graphics card up to 330mm long and 149mm wide. The ability to take such a long graphics card means the ML07 has the makings of a good, compact gaming case that wouldn’t look out of place in your living room.

The only caveat is the need to use an SFX power supply, which few people will have lying around, so you’ll probably need to buy at the same time as the ML07. SFX power supplies are smaller than the standard ATX power supply that you’ll find in many PCs, and are therefore more suitable for small cases such as the ML07.

As for storage, the ML07 has room for one slim, slot-loading optical drive, two 2.5in drives and one 3.5in drive. There are two USB3 ports on the front of the ML07, and these are connected to a USB3 header rather than a pass-through cable. The header connection is a neater solution because it means you won’t have a cable dangling out of the back of your case, and you won’t have the front USB ports consuming one or more of your backpanel USB3 ports. It does, of course, mean that your motherboard must have a USB3 header for them to work.

The ML07’s interior is confusing initially, as is the instruction manual. Essentially, you have to remove the internal structure in order to install the motherboard, power supply and graphics card.

The power supply, for example, must be installed in an internal bracket, which is then screwed into the ML07, near the front. An extension cord is then used to connect the power supply to back panel. Sadly, there’s no power switch on the back panel.

The motherboard is easy to fit, but there’s no CPU cooler cut-out which would have been handy if you wanted to fit a third-party cooler to the board, so you’ll have to fit all components except the graphics card to the motherboard first. You’ll need to choose a short cooler for your processor, though, due to the short height of the ML07. The ceiling height for the processor cooler is 83mm.

To fit a graphics card you must remove an internal bracket and connect the graphics card to it. The graphics card is installed in the case on its side, so a separate connector is used to connect it to your motherboard. As it lies on its side, the graphics card needs to be braced so that it doesn’t bend and get damaged, and this is done by screwing one clip to the bracket and the other to the clip to hold the card in place. The instruction manual doesn’t explain this very well, and it took a while for us to get our head around what we were supposed to do. We weren’t even sure which screw we were supposed to use to screw one clip to another, for example, as all the supplied screws looked similar and didn’t seem long enough to create a secure connection between the two clips.

There are some YouTube videos online that touch on the installation of these clips, but a proper instructional video from SilverStone itself would’ve been better. Once the graphics card has been attached to the bracket you can then install a slim, slot-loading optical drive to it, along with up to two 2.5in drives.

The ML07 is an understated chassis, yet we don’t think it’s exceptionally attractive, and the front switches feel cheap and tacky. The ML07 is also awkward and confusing to build, with poor instructions. However, it’s cheap, it has front USB3 ports and you can install a long graphics card in it. An alternative compact chassis is the similarly priced Lian Li PC-Q27, which looks more like a traditional PC and takes a standard ATX power supply. However, we don’t think the PC-Q27 would make as good a base for a gaming PC, though.

If you like the look of the SilverStone ML07 and you want to build a discreet and compact gaming case, the SilverStone ML07 could be the case for you.