SilverStone Grandia GD07 Review: Centering and Serving Your Media
by Dustin Sklavos on April 29, 2012 1:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
- HTPC
- SilverStone
Conclusion: A Lot of Potential
SilverStone's Grandia GD07 is certainly a compelling option for users like me who use their media center PCs as 24/7 servers as well. That's a small niche, but I have no doubt there are other people who will look at it and find other niches for it as well. For what SilverStone was attempting with the GD07, they've largely excelled and even produced one of their easier-to-use cases. Yet there's definitely room for improvement here.
As I mentioned before, the drive cage is the primary culprit. There was obviously a lot of thought put into the design, but I think it still needs work. The two vertically-mounted 5.25" drive bays should be eschewed for dedicated 2.5" drive bays instead of just squeezing the drives between the other 5.25" bays and the top of the cage. Cabling SSDs in the GD07 is far more trouble than it has any right or reason to be. You'll also want to take care in mounting 5.25" drives to make sure they line up properly with the front of the enclosure.
I also feel like the interior black matte plastic face is a little chintzier than it needs to be. That's a relatively minor complaint given the otherwise attractive black brushed aluminum finish on the front door and the staid black steel build of the rest of the case. Getting rid of the internal fan grilles is a much bigger issue, and needlessly complicates assembly; those grilles were one of the things that made the GD04 at least a little easier to work with.
There's also the fact that the GD07 is frankly pretty large. That owes to observing the ATX spec instead of going with Micro-ATX or Mini-ITX (along with moving the drive cage to the front), but for me it's actually the difference between fitting the GD07 into my entertainment center or having to continue using the GD04 that has faithfully served me since I reviewed it so long ago.
Despite these issues, the GD07 is still a fairly well designed enclosure. Thermal performance is good, and noise is low with room to go lower provided your motherboard has decent fan control or you're willing to shell out for a separate fan controller. Looking at it, you should already know if the GD07 is something you can use or not. If you like the way it looks and it has the features you want or need, it will probably serve you well. Individuals looking for a good HTPC case may need to find something smaller, though.
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randinspace - Monday, April 30, 2012 - link
Dustin, I enjoyed the review, and in particular think you absolutely hit the nail on the head with your conclusion that the system has a lot of potential. I'm left wondering if it has a bit too much potential in place of realized excellence since I would personally have appreciated better cabling options, a fan controller that actually worked, and a straight out dedicated hot swap bay, but the headroom (and accompanying theoretical lack of expense from such inclusions) must only make it more attractive to boutiques like the very Puget Systems mentioned in passing for providing the i3 used in the review.I bring them up mostly since I recall reading a case evaluation they did last year, though unfortunately not the case, in which they mentioned that because of some of the design choices that were made in order to make it "toolless" they didn't trust it to survive shipping with a fully installed system in it. I personally find Puget to be a little too conservative in various ways, but considering that and their willingness to make their own modifications to cases I can at least imagine how a toolless version of the GD07 with grilles on the fans might be an unappealing prospect to an outfit like them. Then again it's not like they actually have a product line the GD07 seems to beg inclusion in (yet?).
As to the "controversy" you alluded to at the start, I don't expressly have a problem with the fact that you used the mini-ITX testbed instead of the (micro) ATX one with a different cooler. However, with the present lack of apples to apples comparisons in the charts, I think the review would have been better served with additional anecdotal comparisons, or even testing out additional fan configurations like some people have been clamoring for. Pulling the fans and maybe even a drive or two out of your own GD05 and then taking the noise and thermal readings again (or even doing noise readings on your GD05 as it usually runs for the aforementioned anecdotal comparison) for instance would have been absolutely brilliant. Then again if you give in to a dog begging for food from the table even once...
Hulk - Monday, April 30, 2012 - link
17" depth is simply too much for most entertainment centers once you figure in stiff HDMI cables. I'm using the GD04 which Anandtech rightly criticized for the loud fans. All you have to do is reconfigure the power leads to the fans so they are running off the 5V rail and voila, it's quiet. Takes about 1 minute and costs nothing. And the cooling of the three 120's is fine for a low power HTPC. In fact I'm running mine that way with a C2D at 3.0GHz no problem with the stock cpu cooler.PhoenixEnigma - Tuesday, May 1, 2012 - link
Agreed on the depth - my GD04 is about as deep as I'd want a media center case to be. 17" is ridiculous, IMO. It's at the point I'd be setting it on its side (tower case style) beside everything else, which sort of defeats the point.One tip - you can get around the HDMI cable (and most other cables, for that matter) issue with angled connectors, or possibly Redmere cables.
zlandar - Monday, April 30, 2012 - link
I have a Grandia GD06. Not sure what the point is of making a case large enough to support ATX boards. As the reviewer pointed out, a major problem with this case style is the lack of height to support a tower-type cooler. There is a 18mm of additional height compared to the GD06 I have, but most tower coolers require 150mm+ which this case is short by 12mm. You can go with a low-profile cooler like a Gemini 2 but the performance will never match a cheap tower like a Hyper 212+.Depending on your HTPC usage you can use a stock cooler and be happy. I use my HTPC for commercial skipping (DVRMStoolbox and showanalyzer) and for transcoding to my iPad (Airvideo) which will take as much cpu as you have. My i3-550 runs fine with a slight overclock to 3.6GHz.
Would also prefer these type of cases come with a fan controller.
Death666Angel - Wednesday, May 2, 2012 - link
I had not problem with my Silverstone LC10B-E. It could fit a tower CPU heatsink just fine and was pretty quiet. You seem to think there are really only about 3 options, which is ludicrous. Tons of CPU heatsinks of various designs fit in those ATX desktop cases quite easily and can cool even overclocked quad cores. My i3 530 ran with the aforementioned tower cooler (cheap Arctic Cooling 64 or something) at 4.5GHz. When I used a Lian Li Cube (V351-B) I had a Noctua NH-C12P, which is just under 12cm with the standard fan (you could always use slims) ,I had my i7 860 running at 3.5GHz just fine. :-)So don't be so narrow minded. Lots of options to choose from in every height and cooling segment. :D
mcnabney - Monday, April 30, 2012 - link
The purpose of this box is to hold an ATX-sized board which provides the extended number of slots and drive connectors to completely populate the case as a home/media server. It has made some mistakes along the way.1. It should have been built 'up' instead of 'out'. It is just too deep. I had to modify my entertainment center for a similar design four years ago. You would have thought that the engineers would have corrected that issue by now.
2. By being too thin you noticed that it wouldn't hold many CPU coolers. This also eliminates the ability to silently cool a CPU - a colossal mistake. Living room PCs shouldn't be making noise.... at all. Small HTPC cases can do it, why not a larger one which should have more options.
3. The drive cage design is stupid. If they are going to provide groups of 5.25" drives they should put them in groups of 3 and also include 3to5 adapters to allow their use in holding 3.5" drives.
4. The best design for the cage would include a thin area across the top that is designed to hold the two 2.5" SSDs AND a slim DVD/BD drive. This would allow the rest of the space to be dedicated 3.5" drive space for storage.
5. There may be ventilation issues for the hard disks. Have you tried filling the case completely with drives (and put them in an array so that activity spins them all) and checking the drive temps? The board looks adequately cooled, but the drive cage looks like a pit of dead air.
mmsmsy - Monday, April 30, 2012 - link
I don't know how PC enclosures could stay pretty much the same for so long when they can be totally reinvented to be less noisy, have less wasted space, be much better ventilated and be much, much, much cheaper. This is getting frustrating since I can't buy literally anything neither to my PC nor a PC to the living room that wouldn't be a complete waste of money, because every single one of them is basically the same and begs to improve it's design. There's only so much to do about it as to build one myself... if I had any skills in bending and cutting metal. Ridiculous...xpeacemaker - Monday, April 30, 2012 - link
Thanks for the review -- I was excited to see a review of this Silverstone's latest product. I own a GD04 and love the look and quality of it. My biggest gripe for the case is that it's obviously cramped and a nightmare to do maintenance on.As time went on, my need for hard drive space has increased in priority, yet physical room inside the case is not available (GD04). In addition, I have a sound card that I would love to add to take over the primary responsibilities of sound output, but I can't because with a 5770 in there, there just isn't any room for it.
I would love to see how this case stacks up compared to the GD04 in detail (since this is a newer model). I am most curious to know, what can I fit in here more comfortably that I couldn't do before? How much hardware can I actually stuff in here without modifying the case? How many hard drives were you able to actually install and wire up completely?
I would have liked to see what you meant by the clearance issues you encountered with the 2.5" drive install.
Sorry for the critical feedback. All that being said, I do appreciate your review.
Stabgotham - Monday, April 30, 2012 - link
Yes, please answer all of these questions. These are the exact questions coming to my mind as well. I'm in the market for an HTPC case, but I really need it to store the physical hard drives (5 x 3.5" HDD's).I'd also really like to see some future reviews of some of the Lian-Li HTPC cases as comparison.
zlandar - Tuesday, May 1, 2012 - link
I keep my hard drives in a separate Sans Digital enclosure. I use four 2TB drives in a RAID 5 connected to my HTPC through eSATA.