SilverStone Raven RV04 Case Review
by Dustin Sklavos on June 20, 2013 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
- SilverStone
- ATX
Conclusion: Wait for the Fortress FT04
The long awaited SilverStone Raven RV04 is a strange bird and a mixed bag. I liken it to NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 480: for its purpose, it was the best, but you had to make some real compromises. The 480 had ugly power consumption and thermals and nasty noise compared to the Radeon HD 5870, even if it was measurably faster. By the same token, the Raven RV04 has a flimsy fascia and door and is needlessly complicated to build a system in, but offers probably the absolute best air cooling performance you can find.
I'm unhappy with the build quality of the RV04 and the internal design. The core concepts of the design and the thermal design itself are all top notch, but the Raven starts breaking down when looked from a practical perspective. If you're not the type to tinker with your desktop, the slightly goofy interior will probably be a one time hassle. Unfortunately, no matter what kind of user you are, you're going to have to deal with the abysmal door design. Is it worth putting up with?
.jpg)
As it turns out, there are a couple of flies in the ointment. First, there's the fact that closed loop coolers are becoming increasingly popular, and the Raven RV04 is very obviously not designed for these. There's space to mount a 120mm closed loop in the rear of the case, but honestly if you do this, you're not using the RV04 properly. Anyone interested in doing any kind of liquid cooling really needs to just rule out the RV04 entirely; this isn't a jack of all trades like many traditional ATX cases are these days, this is an air cooling case through and through.
The other fly in the ointment is the impending Fortress FT04. The FT04 and RV04 use the same chassis, but the FT04 should have a higher quality shell and I suspect the problematic door design will be mitigated somewhat. You'll pay more for the FT04 when it arrives (I've heard around $199), but you can also expect it to be quieter and slightly easier to use. Odds are that's going to be the air cooling case to go for.
Ultimately, once you're in the price bracket the SilverStone Raven RV04 is in, you're probably going to be looking for something more specific than a straight up ATX enclosure. The RV04 is able to perform amazingly well with nothing but two 180mm intake fans and smartly designed airflow, which is something that many high end enclosures only wish they could claim. If you want to build a dual or multi-GPU rig, use cards that come with blower-style coolers, and then stick something like a Noctua NH-U12S or NH-U14S on the CPU. At that point I'd be hard-pressed to find a more efficient air-cooled design, and for those purposes I would recommend the RV04. However, given my intense misgivings about the door design, I'm inclined to play the waiting game and see how the Fortress FT04 turns out and I would advise you to do the same.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
26 Comments
View All Comments
maximumGPU - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
to be honest the AP's have killer airflow, but i think they tend towards the "loud" side of the equation a bit too much for my taste. If there was a 180mm fan out there with similar airflow but quieter i'd change my AP's in a heartbeat.JDG1980 - Saturday, June 22, 2013 - link
Did you try the AP182? It has an analog controller built in so that it can be adjusted to exactly the speed/noise level you want. And its controller has the same screw spacing as the switch on the AP181, so you can integrate it into a TJ08-E or FT02 and mount the potentiometer in the same place the speed switch on the old fan was.Impulses - Thursday, June 27, 2013 - link
I think you and the industry in general are over thinking this... Straight airflow was prefectly achievable with some of the oldest ATX cases out there, most of them just had oddly placed fan mounts... Straight airflow with a standard ATX case only became harder to work out when they started putting the PSU at the bottom which then brought the drive bays in line with the CPU/RAM (and with this case we've now come full circle, it'd work equally well if you flipped it all around and would probably leave more bay room on the bottom).I have an old/cheap Thermaltake case I've clung to because the front fan mount (s) were tied to the hard drive bay, which could be placed at any point in the 5.25" stack... Thus, I've got am optical driveand card reader in line with the PSU at the top, a fan mount just below that in line with the CPU fan, and some freedom to configure either front or side intake for the GPUs depending on whether I'm running blower style coolers or open ones...
The only thing wrong with the original ATX spec was the position of the fan mounts and the industry's obsession with having a smorgasbord of 5.25" bays on nine out of ten cases. Even having the PSU near the CPU isn't a big deal anymore with current CPU/PSU designs, certainly no worse than having it next to several GPUs that can get 10-20 degrees hotter than any CPU (each!). It baffles me that everyone keeps flirting with so many oddball designs and ignoring the plainly obvious, the more you mangle a case's flow of air the worse it'll do.
genghisquan - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
While he did praise the cases's airflow/cooling abilities, the author points out several flaws in this case's design. I didn't get the "on and on" vibe that you were talkin' about. However, I still have to agree with you that the earlier Raven designs were way better than this.7amood - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
I love the case internal design but I hate all the plastic. I'll wait for the TJ04 maybe they will use an easily removable front door rather than using this stupid hinge door.Shiitaki - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
I currently have the Raven RV03 case and love the original design of rotating the motherboard. The included fans on the bottom should be 200mm, and quieter ones would be an improvement. The big reason for me was the ease of connecting things, not having to crawl under the desk, and reach behind the case. I keep it on the floor, as most people with large cases do. The RV04 is just a case, like any other. There's nothing novel or original about it. Antec used a similar cooling design of blowing air from front to back 15 years ago. Considering how much work it is to assemble a Silverstone case, without a justification, it's just going to be an annoyance to build for no reason.