SilverStone Raven RV04 Case Review
by Dustin Sklavos on June 20, 2013 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
- SilverStone
- ATX
Assembling the SilverStone Raven RV04
As I said, there's a place for everything and everything is in its place in the SilverStone Raven RV04, and there's also a clear way the case comes apart and then back together again. As is typical of SilverStone cases, the RV04 is not an entry level design. Virtually nothing about it is toolless and assembling a system inside it requires at least a little doing. It mostly makes sense, but you'll definitely want to read the instruction manual.
For starters, the motherboard tray is removable, but not in the traditional sense. Traditional removable trays actually slide out of the back of the case and take the expansion slots with them, but this tray is for just the motherboard. It's held into place by notches, and three screws secure it. Remove the screws and you're left with a tray that has six standoffs preinstalled and markings that helpfully measure the size of your motherboard but also tell you which standoff holes to populate depending on your board's spec. The nice thing about this design is that it allows you to pop the I/O backplane in and then use the tray itself for leverage if you're dealing with a particularly thick or finicky backplane.
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Before you do that, though, you'll want to remove the primary drive cage (the one that holds the five 3.5" drives) and the top panel of the case. That drive cage is going to obscure the primary ATX line on the motherboard, so you'll also want to wire up power to the motherboard before anything else. In times like these, a modular power supply can be a huge help.
3.5" drives securely mount to the inside of the cage, but you'll have to screw them in manually. The same is true for the 5.25" drives; the shields are easy enough to remove from the bays, but you'll have to use special thumbscrews included with the RV04 to mount the drives themselves. Installing 2.5" drives in the Raven RV04 is the stuff of nightmares, though. The manual recommends you remove the cages above the 2.5" drives when you do the installation, but that's not actually the issue.
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The placement of the screws for mounting the drives is the issue. The rear cage is probably easy enough to use, but the front one is obstructed by the plastic shroud around the front feet of the case. It's just a poor design.
Thankfully, there's much better clearance for the power supply in the RV04 than there was in the TJ08-E, and allowances were made to make installing expansion cards at least a little easier. There are holes in the chassis to allow a screwdriver to pass through and tighten or loosen the screws used to secure expansion cards.
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Wiring the RV04 proves to be a bit of a mess, though. While the TJ08-E was an even more difficult case to wire, the RV04 is no slouch either. Part of the issue stems from the orientation of all the individual components. SSDs are oriented with their connectors towards the center of the case and designed to be cabled through holes in the tray below the motherboard itself. 3.5" hard drives are oriented parallel to the case itself, so their connectors face the CPU's heatsink. This is by necessity; drive cages can substantially obstruct front intakes, so orienting them in this fashion complicates cabling a little but also tremendously improves flow-through to the CPU.
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Case headers and SATA lines prove to be all over the map, though. There are ways many of these cables are supposed to be routed, but there are also loose cable loops from the way the front fans are wired together (and from there to their speed switches on the front). The RV04 is also remarkably shallow for an ATX case; this is undoubtedly by design and not necessarily a bad thing.
I found assembly of the Raven RV04 to be mostly sensible, but also in many ways needlessly complicated. The science behind the design is sound, but this is clearly engineered for efficient cooling first, with usability being a distant second. I feel like SilverStone could've done a better job simplifying and streamlining the design of the RV04. All through assembly, the same thought kept going through my head: "this thing had better be worth the hassle."
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genghisquan - Thursday, June 20, 2013 - link
The graph really should have RV02 and/or RV03 comparisons. I was already iffy about this case when I first saw pictures of it. Rather than keeping what was great about the RV02 and trying to improve the few errors that it had, it seemed like the RV04 wanted to do something completely new. Why change what was already good about the RV02?JeBarr - Thursday, June 20, 2013 - link
I too would have liked to see a comparison with the previous Raven chassis but the designs were so good they lasted far longer than most reviewer test beds.This new Raven, though showing great performance numbers is just so dang ugly. Heck, I'd take the RV03 with champagne trim before getting anywhere near this new pile.
losttsol - Thursday, June 20, 2013 - link
Silverstone sure has put out some strange cases lately. Are they under new management or something? Maybe there's just so much you can do with a rectangle? I used to love their designs, but I wouldn't even put them in my top 5 anymore.landerf - Thursday, June 20, 2013 - link
What the hell is that? Fucking gross looking. They've fallen far from the FT02 days. All they needed to do was update that and they'd have a real winner instead of this plastic clown.smellykaka - Thursday, June 20, 2013 - link
It looks to me like you could make a massive improvement in the look of this case just by removing the front door entirely?smellykaka - Thursday, June 20, 2013 - link
Bitterly disappointing, the terrible look and terrible drive layout, because a case with minimal 5 1/4 bays and multiple big fat front fans has been on my wishlist for a long time.JDG1980 - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
Antec's P280 has a soundproofed front door.Shinobisan - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
I'm being a bit 'counter culture' and thought I would write out my experience.I was using a Corsair H80 closed loop cooler, and it died. Critical Failure. The pump went bad, and before I noticed the extra noise... my PC was shutting down due to CPU over-temp.
I'm so glad my motherboard saved me there.!
So... my conclusion can be a quote from good ol' Scotty, "The fancier they make them, the easier it is to plug them up".
For me, the closed loop cooler is just too much of a risk. There are too many critical components that can fail and cause bad things to happen.
I went with one of the latest fan coolers now, the Noctua NH-D14. Super cool, less risk of failure.
Oh... also a bit of a note on the closed loop type coolers - specifically radiator installation.
They recommend setting up the radiator to pull in fresh air from the back of the chassis. This is the best cooling method. But only for the first week.
My PC chassis is great, with air filters on all intakes. This keeps everything running nice and cool because there isn't any internal dust buildup.
BUT... the H80 doesn't have an air filter. When I went to remove it, there was dust blocking about half the radiator. So, the radiator was working at half efficiency.
If I would have installed it the other way around, it would pull warmer air from inside the chassis and exhaust out the back. This would have been slightly less effective, but the performance would not have dipped over time. In the long run it would have been better to keep it clean.
Not many reviews cover the dust issue. Short term it doesn't matter (like on these test beds)... but long term... dust will kill your cooling.
HisDivineOrder - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
Ehhhh... I don't know. I mean, it just seems like to me you're going on and on about how well designed this case is and how it's cutting edge this and what not.It's like they took one of those ancient Lian Li cases I had a long time ago that inverted the motherboard upside down where, yes, you had to go in from the other side. Then they tossed the biggest, most awesome fans they could put in the front.
Is that cutting edge design? Is that amazing? I think I was more impressed by earlier Raven designs and I fail to see the advantage of this one over those designs. At least they had the advantage of pushing air upwards and out of the case. You talk about air moving straight through the case being important, but I don't see how having hot air exhaust in the natural way up isn't the superior way of handling a scenario where a case doesn't have an exhaust fan.
And I also don't see why having an exhaust fan is preferable to having one unless it's the loudest, most annoying exhaust fan in the history of the world. Even a really, really, REALLY slow one would be better than not having one.
JDG1980 - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
The inverted motherboard tray is actually a pretty big deal. As the review notes, for optimal cooling, you want the intake fans blowing straight at the CPU and GPU heatsinks. But a standard ATX case doesn't do that; instead, one intake fan covers maybe the lower half of the motherboard (including the GPU, if you're lucky), and the other one blows at the back of the power supply, which is usually a waste. The CPU heatsink sits behind the 5.25" drive bays, getting little airflow except from its own fan and maybe a small assist from the exhaust unit. This design has little more than tradition to recommend it. Flipping the motherboard upside down may sound simple, but it makes a big difference because the whole motherboard now gets covered by the airflow from the intake fans. (You could, I suppose, leave the motherboard as-is and put the external drive bays and PSU on the bottom, but no one wants their drive bays down there.)I do prefer the rotated motherboard design, but it is clearly more complex; because of the orientation of the motherboard and card ports, you need a "fake roof" to route the external wiring out the back, unless you want it to look really, really ugly.
The photos indicate that the RV04 has a mount for a rear exhaust fan, even though the fan itself is not included. So it shouldn't be at all difficult to add one if you were so inclined. I wonder if this mount will be populated by default on the FT04.
But I do think you're right about one thing: SilverStone gets a lot of cooling design wins because they have "the biggest, most awesome fans". Nothing else out there really equals the AP181 and AP182. Even cases with 200mm or bigger fans seem to fall behind compared to the SilverStones. And the fans aren't that loud, either. What I don't understand is why, given clear design wins like the FT02 and TJ08-E, other companies haven't specced out high-quality 180mm fans and given SilverStone a run for their money on this turf. I wonder if Nidec could be convinced to design a line of 180mm Gentle Typhoons?