Gadgetory

Silverstone's rrb z03 raven case is one of the truest to form small form-factor cases on the market sizing it at just 14 liters and filling a size category that competes with gaming consoles the RBZ 0-3 is an enthusiasts mini ITX chassis packing as much into as tiny of a box as possible it also happens to be one of the most ventilated ITX cases we've looked at lately and does so while sticking to a properly small form-factor the question is whether or not it's worth a buy and how restricting it might be for builds before that this video is brought to you by the EVGA CLC 280 liquid cooler people ask me how I keep cool during the summer with all this hair well I've tried a lot of different products and if you do exactly what I need many of them cause tangles or worse EVGA CLC 280 helps keep my core temperatures low they're in hot benchmarking sessions the CLC 280 is price competitive and focuses on performance for value offering a 280 liquid cooler at an affordable price get yours at the link in the description below hair mounting kit sold separately this is the silverstone rvz 0-3 it's a thin almost console like enclosure very portable lightweight and it could be stood up either as you saw it or laid on its side obviously this case has had several improvements over Silverstone's past small form-factor rvz cases including the r VZ 0 1 - e specifically - II for this one which we didn't review but we saw it previously when it was brand new and we also saw the RBZ 0 - at CES 2015 the updates overall include some features that you might not approve of like removal of a slim optical drive so from an HT VC standpoint you do lose some of that versatility of having a slim obstacle drive in there you'll still have to get an external optical drive if you want to play any kind of blu-ray media or anything like that but from an internal standpoint removing that drive and actually a couple of the other changes they made like to the acrylic means that the GPU is more or less completely compartmentalized from the rest of the case and it's a great thing because what happens is this case now has to 120-millimeter fan mounts here right in front of the video card and those helped tremendously in cooling it also comes with two 120-millimeter fans and they are slim fans too so you do get enough clearance in there to fit pretty much any card that will fit into slots which is all this supports anyway and then there's also breathing the area down here and then there's a fan mount back on this side so the case is very well thought-out for how small it is the biggest challenge with these ITX cases is you've got ITX intent of two categories you have like the NZXT h 200 series i TX wear or the Manta wear it's basically just a really small ATX box it's hardly small form-factor because those cases are large enough to fit small Tower coolers they can fit all kinds of CLC is most of the time the Corsair - ATX as an example of a micro ATX case is about the same size as some of the larger mini ITX cases and this is the opposite side of things it's properly small form factor so it's targeted at a different market something like this fits better with our test bench then things like the 280 axed with H 200 because you just can't fit a bigger CPU cooler in here and so that puts a lot more on the case company to design properly and really work well with the space that they have because this is roughly the size of something like an Xbox or a DVR there's not a lot of space in there and again that comes down to case engineering and design make sure you have enough room for cables where you can and air flow options where you can and in this case they've included to 120 fans which actually do a great job as you'll see in our thermal testing section and they've managed to do it by just using slim fans silverstone being a manufacturer of fans they have the ability to get a bit more custom than some of their competitors so the case overall is built as a further evolution it's about 90 to 115 dollars depending on where you buy it typically ninety five dollars to the black version and it is meant to be a truly small form-factor chassis that does mean that it's going to have some interesting thermal characteristics which we'll get through entirely on the front of the case the ubiquitous v's on the front our clear plastic backlit with RGB LEDs that are hooked up to a controller and the controller can accept input from a standard four pin RGB header and includes adaptors to control the normal LED strips as well if you wanted those let's go through Patrick's build notes on assembly and the build quality of the case assembly wasn't too demanding overall but installing the graphics card was the most elaborate part of the process as with the RV's easier to Silverstone provides a plastic shell that houses SSDs GPUs and a rigid PCIe riser part of this shell is an adjustable plastic clamp to hold the GPU firmly in place but we had difficulty finding a spot where it wouldn't interfere with the fan on our card every GPU is different and cooler design and it's hard to account for every possible variation the clamp isn't strictly necessary but it seems like a good idea in a case with such tight tolerances so we dragged it into place with a scrap piece of plastic once the whole frame was assembled it actually made installation easier just plug in the power cables and slot the whole thing down onto the motherboard without having to reach inside the case with a screwdriver there is technically space for an ATX power supply but given a limited space for cable management SFX is a better choice the maximum supported power supply depth is 150 millimeters but silverstone recommends a modular PSU that's 140 or less our NR max power supply is only 100 millimeters long and that was definitely a good thing choosing a small graphics card also allows some extra space but it's separated from the PSU and it's hard to take advantage of to 120 millimeter fans with space for a third is lavish for an ITX case of this size and the stock fans are placed directly over the CPU and GPU for maximum efficacy or they would be if our GPU were longer airflow is an entirely positive pressure even the vents that don't contain fans are over GPU and power supply in takes all exhaust is vented out the back of the case through some holes beside the i/o and there are three filters that ship with the case one for each 120mm fan mounts the filter material is an extremely breathable fine mesh closer to a fabric and the frames are magnetic so they're intended for use on the outside of the case and are relatively easy to clean if they're placed on the inside of the case between the fan and the side panel the fabric scrapes against the fan blades and is problematic so Pacific kid on the outside for this one in addition to the usual tests we did a test pass with filters applied but only two of them for the two 120mm fans just to see if they create enough impedance to damage airflow in any meaningful way we also did one with the GPU intake fan moved directly over the GPU because the stock configuration assumes a normal-sized video card and to Silverstone's credit the fact that this can fit something like a ten and a half inch reference card is impressive but that's how we're reusing for our test bench we're using a smaller card for compatibility with basically all ITX cases and so for that we moved the fan to the other slot so that it would cool our GPU more directly just for some comparative numbers and data and overall a reminder as always ITX case testing is difficult to do in a scientific way but we're still controlling for variables and all that it means is that for cases that are larger like a - ATX for an h 200 you can put a bigger cooler in there and obviously circumvent any potential issues caused by a downdraft cooler for this case you'll want to compare it most directly something like the Taku or the other ITX case is that silverstone makes the SG series for example anything that's small enough that you're forced to use smaller coolers and components to make the build work that's what the direct comparison is whereas the larger enclosures have that benefit of being able to use a bigger cooler it's just that for testing purposes we don't do it but as always being fully transparent and saying look this test methodology is not perfect in fact it's the most difficult to perfect out of all the testing we do because ITX cases just have so many dam options so we're doing our best to normalize it but you have to look at the data with some level of your own direction what you're trying to do with a build so you can just mentally it make adjustments where you know you have more room to put better coolers and things like that so not hard and fast data but a very good comparison for a baseline starting with only the RV z03 before comparative data CBO delta T was 49.1 degrees Celsius under a torture workload which remained within margin of error of the GPU intake fan shifted over which measured 48 point five degrees over ambience because the configuration of the case and the PCIe riser the CPU and GPU are completely compartmentalized and the airflow pattern of one doesn't much affect the other putting the external filters on didn't have any significant effect on temperature either which is good news for anyone planning to use the case horizontally with fans close to a dusty desk comparatively for CPU thermals forty nine point one degrees Celsius is definitively the lowest CPU temperature we've measured yet during an MIT X torture test and that's thanks to the active cooling from the case fans the RBZ 0-3 is specifically designed for short flat coolers like the cryo rig c7 we use for testing so it's airflow pattern suits our build much better than cases like the thermal take core v1 that are designed around tower coolers let's move on the GPU thermals just for the raven with all fans and stock positions GPU temperature was fifty eight point one degrees celsius over ambiens and again this didn't change meaningfully with the addition of filters where the case fans shifted over the GPU though there was a huge drop in temperatures down to 42 point three degrees celsius a ver egde the stock fan configuration is more suited to long graphics cards and shifting the case van over to supply air directly to the GPU makes sense for cards with fewer than two fans in past tests we've often seen a slight increase in CPU temperatures as we push heat out of the GPU more effectively but that isn't an issue here because of the separation between the chambers in this case comparatively GPU thermals are next the stock fan configuration still resulted in better GB temperatures than the cryo rate Taku but fifty eight point one degrees Celsius tells us he / ambience is still relatively warm the fan pulls air inwards toward the front of the GPU but the fan on the GPU cooler is forced to fend for itself and pull air from outside of the side panel vent shifting the fan to this event let's the GPU fan and the case fan work together and vent air out of the back of the case or even out of the empty fans lot the pattern doesn't really matter because it's isolated from the rest of the components 42.3 degrees celsius is by far the best GPU DT we've seen in an MIT axe torture test so far GPU DT and 3d mark was exactly the same as it was in the torture test fifty eight point one degrees Celsius over ambient again that's better than the Taku but not over all good and again if we moved the fan over it it would cool much better as you saw previously so this isn't really a mark against the Raven just a note to be conscious of how your video card is positioned versus the fan rendering with blender is up next CPU Delta temperature during the Seabee render was thirty nine point eight degrees Celsius outstripping the previous best average of forty five point seven degrees Celsius over ambient for the 280 X and that's by a comfortable margin to thanks to the internal separation of the case the GPU idle barely above ambient during this test at an average of seven point four degrees Celsius delta T we always do these tests with the fans in the stock configuration so average GPU temperature during the GPU render was a bit higher than it needed to be at thirty five point nine degrees that makes it yet again better than the Taku and worse than everything else with the fan moved over however it would reasonably expected to beat the every other case on the chart as we saw in our initial torture test the separation benefited the CPU in this test just like it did the GPU in the previous one and averaged just sixteen point nine degrees Celsius DT during the render since our CPU cooler is invariably the loudest part of our Mini ITX test bench we turn it down to ninety percent for noise normalize testing where we can in the RV's e03 that alone was enough to reach our desired threshold moreover because the cv benefits so much from the case pan pushing air into it there was hardly any difference in temperatures even with this reduction in speed forty nine point nine degrees celsius dt versus forty nine point one v RM thermals were measured with a k-type thermocouple placed on the hottest mosfet vrm temperatures average 34 point one degrees celsius dt under load and vsoc average 34 degrees that's even lower than the open air test we did with cryo eggs Taku drawer opened and it shows the benefit of a side intake fan pointed at the motherboard we measure of erm temperatures just as a way to compare cases there's little chance of it ever get into a dangerous level with the components we're using they're far far below a spec but it's a good way just to measure the airflow patterns the raven RB z03 is a tiny case with disproportionately good cooling and we're glad that we're doing ITX testing now because it finally lets us test things like this although as noted we have a lot of things we're considering redoing in our test methodology like for example splitting off this test bench to focus on cases of this size and building a separate test bench maybe for cases that would accommodate a 92 millimeter cooler that's all under works and we'll figure it out eventually as we do more of these but for our ITX test bench it's basically a perfect fit for something like this and this case is as noted just disproportionately good at cooling for its size tolerances are tight so if you're buying something like this the measurements the dimensions of everything should be checked and rechecked a couple of times to make sure you're not buying stuff that won't fit technically it supports larger devices bigger video card ATX power supplies up to a certain degree 140 or so millimeters but we find that these smaller devices like SFX power supplies are going to make your life a lot easier just in cable management alone it's impressive how effectively and efficiently Silverstone has managed to use the case in this small form-factor they've got the space available is well allocated in a way that makes a lot of sense for compartmentalizing the GPU and the CPU and building it in a way that is not an inhibitor to the process so although it's small and although it does unique things with compartmentalization the build process itself isn't significantly more difficult than normally more difficult yes but primarily in a cable management perspective silverstone has used space well here without hurting performance drive support is limited neither a 3.5 inch nor optical drives are supported so that's a potential downside for you it's probably more suited to a livingroom gaming or streaming PC than it is as an htpc unless you have your data storage for all of your media content on a separate device or an ass or something like that the case is currently about a hundred bucks I'm new I can Amazon will link it below if you want it because we do like the case overall it is one of the better cases we've worked with it some flaws yes it's not for everyone but at its price it's a bit steep compared to a lot of the MIT X cubes out there like the core of you want do you want something cheap and still pretty good the thermaltake core v1 is great and the silverstone SG 13 we worked with previously is also pretty damn good but it's just gonna depend on how much money you have basically for your build this case performs better than those two technically it's just smaller so you can put a bigger cooler on either of those if you want to do in make up for a lot of the differences and this is also cheaper than Silverstone's own similarly shaped ftz zero one which we might be reviewing shortly we do have one so anyway if you have interest in ITX reviews that are similar to this size please let us know what the cases are called post them below we'll try to get them because we want to work with things right now that are less of boxy and make more sense for a downdraft or really low profile cooler because that's kind of what we spect our test bench for so if you have ideas on that stuff please post it below if you have other ITX cases you want us treat you that a more cube lake will consider it it's just we might build a new test bench for those first because they do better with different components so very difficult to test all these in a standardized way but we'll do our best as always you can support our efforts directly on patreon.com slash gamers nexus if you like what we do here go to store it on cameras nexus dotnet to pick up a mod mat like the one in front of me it is a great 4 foot by 2 foot building service with anti-static components included and also has great reference material on it if you want to make your build a bit easier alternatively pick up one of our Gianna Ward crystals also located on the store or one of our shirts subscribe for more as always thank you for watching I'll see you all next time