Today we inaugurate a series of articles about the famous SilverStone brand, starting with an analysis of its proprietary cooling solutions. Furthermore, we will present a series of cabinets each having different features, hence oriented to different user groups; we’ll also present during the analysis several interesting products, always of the same brand.
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RV03–Black, Part-2
Now we will analyze one of the cases that recently have met a lot of success in the market, the SilverStone Raven RV03. It looks like a cabinet of modern style, aggressive, but certainly not a simple one, with a front bay with up to 7 x 5.25” slots, a ventilation grille on each of the aforementioned slot, and two 180mm AP181 fans below. We got also modern power and reset buttons at the top front, to the left and right. Tanks to the construction and assembly with high quality steel, similar to the previous model RV01 but with several improvements, the quality is high, although we’ve got some hard plastic frontally and to the upper part, but in the end even here the quality is good. It recalls the basic idea of the Black Crow (Raven), concept that we can find in many old cult movie that some enthusiast people should remember... However, at the top we got the usual USB2.0 ports, in a concealed compartment, microphone and audio, along with a fan controller, where you can select the rotation speed of the two underlying AP181. Intentionally, there isn’t any frontal HD bay, on the contrary there is a revolutionary system in the left lateral side panel, which allows the assembly of several data storage devices in a vertical position, all in a separate partition, and ventilated by a 120mm fan (optional). This very thick compartment allows great wirings and aesthetics. In addition, there is a front ventilation grille for each removable front-plate. Many will wonder what we're talking about. Well, we give you a visual demonstration:
In the frontal panel we can even mount a giant integrated liquid-cooling heatsink, even a dual-fan style one like the Corsair H100, like we did in this review
http://www.xtremehardware.com/cooling/liquid/corsair-h100-201110315957/4/
Let’s report a quote from the H100 review:
"The temperatures obtained by the H100 are the best recorded to date, just above the H20 920 made by the Antec, especially in Push / Pull. By installing the H100 in the Raven 3, the temperatures have risen about just 3 degrees, demonstrating the excellent performance in environments with less ventilation".
Although the result wasn’t very high, due to the orientation of the cooler itself, the interesting fact is that it was possible to mount this kind of heatsink in front of the cabinet, and firmly! This is a clear indicator of the excellent design of this case, and its very good internal layout! In few other cases we could have done such a thing.
Regarding the famous Raven Series, we report a video directly made by SilverStone, showing an RV01:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1Xgjvf0SDc&feature=player_embedded
The side walls are equipped with noise-absorbing material, but the left one is windowed; this gives an excellent overall aesthetics and we could even add aftermarket light systems like for example LEDs and neon lights. Opening the right side panel, we can see a structure really unconventional, but even here Silverstone engineers have studied the air flow up to the smallest detail. Also, an exemplary cable management can be easily achieved! The arrangement and the practicality of the two dust filters is very good: they are removable thanks to a magnetic system and they are present for both the 180mm fans and for the power supply fan, which is placed at the base. Very nice is the retention plate for the motherboard, which also features a rear opening for a quick installation of aftermarket heatsinks. The possibility to implement an additional 120mm fan in the rear, thanks to a ventilated grille, is very interesting too.
The Raven RV03 is also available in a cheaper version, with black coloring. The disk management is revolutionary, although the FT01 is still better. In the RV03 disks must be accessed by the right side and it doesn’t allow hot-swap adapters, unfortunately. In the upper part there are several air vents and the RV03 grants a great compatibility with large heatsinks and with very large motherboards, such as the Asus Rampage II Extreme, whose installation would not lead to any particular problem. Here you can see some photos of the impressive RV03:
We report a note about the temperature test of the Thermalright HR02 Macho heatsink, which has been mounted inside this cabinet, even in a fanless configuration. Thanks to the astonishing ventilation of the RV03, we’ve been able to bring the CPU up to 3.4GHz without fans on the heatsink!
"As shown by the graph, it’s evident that we are in front of a product that can achieve excellent operating temperatures. We were really surprised to see that this brand new heatsink held very good an Intel Core i7 920 with 130w TDP, in a fanless configuration (thanks to the excellent active heat dissipation of the two AP181 SilverStone fans, in the RAVEN3)! This result is remarkable. With the processor overclocked to 3.4 GHz, the situation starts to get complicated with a fanless configuration, otherwise if we install the Thermalright bundled fan it barely changes. Finally at the frequency of 4 GHz, the HR02 Macho can cope with the i7 920, in a very efficient and silent way."
Link to the review: http://www.xtremehardware.com/cooling/air/dissipatore-cpu-thermalright-hr-02-macho-201109055664/6/
We performed also some test of the Alpenfohn Peter VGA cooler, inside the Raven3 with its classical configuration, and rotating it of 90 degrees, in order to emulate a common cabinet design: http://www.xtremehardware.com/cooling/air/alpenfohn-peter-201109125697/4/
Results of VGA tests, which you can also find in next chapters, show , that this cabinet can be more efficient than other much larger models, thanks to the excellent internal layout.
