Silverstone’s latest Raven is the third in the series best known for its rotated- motherboard configuration, which puts the I/O backplane at the top of the chassis. The PSU mounts at the bottom-front of the case, and the entire mobo setup is cooled from below, using two upward-blowing 18cm fans.
The Raven tallies some impressive numbers: There’s room for eight PCI slots, four 3.5-inch hard drive mounts, two 2.5-inch bays behind the motherboard tray, and eight 5.25-inch bays. The spacious interior can fit a 12.2-inch GPU with ease. Thanks to four cable-routing cutouts, a cleanly wired build is easy. And the two 18cm filtered intake fans gave the RV03 the best air-cooling temperatures of any case in our roundup, including the premium ones.
We’re not sure how we feel about the RV03’s exterior, though. Last year’s Raven RV02 had a similar superhero-themed look, but was all black. This Raven has two gold stripes running up the front of the chassis, which strikes us as a bit tacky.
Overall, the Silverstone Raven RV03 is a solid case, and gets points for ingenuity. It may look a little garish and feel a little plasticky, but it’s roomy, features a stunning amount of ports and slots, and offers a crazy-organized build and great cooling.
$140, www.silverstonetek.com
Stunningly organized build; tons of slots and ports; very roomy; good cooling
Lots and lots of plastic; tacky color scheme
shurojin
July 29, 2011 at 6:15pm
A few things worth noting about this case that was missed in the article and previous comments :)
There are 2 hard drive cages located behind the optical bays, each cage supports an additional 3 hard drives, giving this case the capacity for 10 hard drives, and 2 SSDs.
Each hard drive cage can mount 2 120mm fans as well to act as a front intake through the filtered optical bay covers, however only one fan may be mounted on a cage if HDDs are installed.
Aaand... they announced a RV-03 WA version of the case, which sports simply a color change of the champagne stripes, to a more suiting titanium grey. The color alteration is set to launch this august i believe. And I'll be buying it as soon as possible :)
misha573
June 14, 2011 at 10:15am
Wow! MaxPC is feeling generous! Here we have the continuation of a series that:
1. Reduces the number of out-of-the-box 3.5" hard drive bays (although you do get two 2.5" mounts), and
2. Switches from a simple swapable hard drive bay configuration to some unwieldly brackets behind the mobo-panel gizmo (so no hot swapping for you folks with 4 or more 2TB drives in raid configs in case of drive failure so can get to rebuilding without a whole bunch of work...that is no longer maximum...too rare to be of any concern really)
An 8 maybe, but not a 9 (kick Ass or No).
ryantmer
June 13, 2011 at 2:33pm
Four 3.5" mounts, and EIGHT 5.25"?! While I realize some fan controllers use 2-3 of these bays, even a big one plus a DVD drive is only four 5.25" drives... Whereas hard drives, well, you can never have too many! This really should have sacrificed a few 5.25's for 3.5's in my opinion... =/ Still, nice looking case!
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