Gadgetory

this case is pretty unique The Raven Oh - was one of the first if not the first it's probably one of the first will say that to invert the motherboard layout obviously as you can see here this is something that's been done more recently by the Corsair 600c the be quiet cases are capable of it and a couple of others are as well but the Raven O two really took a chance with it and in doing so they also were able to elongate the case like crazy it's it's pretty disproportionately lawn and that's to accommodate three 180 millimeter fans that we just recently tested against a couple of 200 millimeter fans and we found that they were among the best performing large fans of the time so you've got three of the best fans of this form factor in a large case that's inverted the layout such that the air from the bottom to Center fans goes straight into a tower cooler and the next two fans will go right in front of the GPU or through the drive cages before that this video is brought to you by EVGA and the X 299 dark motherboard for the Intel high-end desktop CPUs the X 299 dark is one of the only motherboards on the market with proper vrm cooling we've tested this and found significant performance increase over those without active cooling on the BRMS this board was used in our recent attempts to set a top 10 record in fire strike and you can learn more about the X - 9 dark at the link in the description below this was also from an era when closed-loop liquid cooling was not quite as popular there's not great liquid cooling support in here today the case has plenty of shortcomings that wouldn't work out very well in the modern market one such example would be having one two three four optical drive cages in the front so you got four or five and a quarters you could put it in if you want to do a bootleg operation of mass-producing bootleg disks I guess obviously that would never happen I mean even you could leave one in there and take the next three and just accommodate another five hard drives which by the way would make this an amazing server case especially because it's already got a 180 fan pushing air straight through the drive cages but airflow was it's big and for airflow the Front's completely closed off and that makes sense because it's pulling all the intake through the bottom it's elevated pretty high about an inch and it's got the three high-powered vent these fans have a built-in grill on the top that grill is actually meant to help increase the range so they're kind of long-range fans and increases it in a way that when the air goes through the fan it's almost conical it's like completely straight line in the shape of the fan itself so that allows the air to get pushed straight into the components another aspect of this silverstone claimed at the time that part of the cooling for this case was stack effect cooling which is more or less just a basic physics principle of saying that because the pressure orientation of the system and because of the bottom intake you have a stack effect as unlike a smoke stack a chimney where the air is just going to naturally grafton through the bottom which is kind of odd because silverstone has done a lot of good engineering work here and they're giving a good amount of credit in marketing to just physics which I suppose sounds cool from a scientific sound it makes them sound like they're sciency but they're taking credit away from their actual engineering so it's a bit odd especially because well you'll see a bit later but one of the tests that we didn't do at the time I should say I didn't it was just me in 2012 working on this case was with the whole stack effect cooling thing if you just rotate the case does it perform the same as when it's in its stock configuration so if we rotate this in a way that it's like that so the case is on its face and the fans are now intake from here which is this is the new front and the exhaust is over there it's a standard case layout at that point does it perform the same does this stack affect cooling actually have a meaningful difference or advantage and spoiler alert the answer is no but that's just because once you have this many fans in it any natural physics is just completely irrelevant anyway intake on the bottom there's a 120 at the top for exhaust and that's it other than that your power supply gets air through the outside through the back it has its own filter on it and then that air comes out of the top here as well right here are three switches to control the speed of the fans and those go from 1200 to about 800 rpm it's actually quite a significant reduction in noise which we'll talk about in a moment and the kind of smaller gripes to go over them not that you're buying this case today but having these internal doesn't make a lot of sense you have to remove the panel to access them and this panel and the bar act as kind of a cable management solution because all of your cables come out of here and you're routing them this way so now if you're removing the panel just to access your fence which is kind of defeats a lot of the purpose of what they're doing so that was not choice this one does have USB 3 in the front I think the original original Raven O 2 did not but I'm not positive on that USB 3 on the front they do have the older style color cables so it you know red yellow black all that which we prefer Patrick not both because you can actually see what the cables doing as opposed to black out everything that's modern today although it certainly doesn't look as good kale management features are pretty bad this case is function focused it doesn't do any work for you kale management wise at all but it's well we'll see how it cools today one thing that they did do really well was the dust filters for the large fans each one has its own dust filter and the fans can be pretty easily removed and replaced which we've done a few times now so that's a that's all the basics of the system the main thing here is to test thermals and noise because from a noise perspective you've got a completely closed off front so no noise is getting out over there which is where the user will be positioned all the noise is kind of lower in the case from a thermal perspective you're feeding air within 6 inches straight into a tower cooler because again liquid coolers weren't that common at this point and also feeding air within an inch straight into the GPU or well at least found it not straight into it because it is going kind of around either side of the cart so let's go through the thermal numbers and the noise and see how this case holds up today so recapping the art b02 has two advertised features that could have interesting effect on thermals and inverted layout and the three Silverstone 180 millimeter air penetrator fans pointed straight across the motherboard we did our normal round of test with the fans at max speed one additional test with three air penetrators set to low and a final test with the entire case flipped onto its front to eliminate the supposed benefits of stack effect cooling it is scientific fact that hot air rises but whether or not this is enough to have an effect on a tiny metal box with high rpm fans blowing into it is doubtful molecular movement increases about four percent for every 25 C which is minimal when compared to what large fans naturally do starting with the big C be tortured charged C be a delta T over ambient in the torture test was forty three point one degrees Celsius toggling the three 180 millimeter fans to their lower speed and they only have to slowed them from 1200 rpm to 800 rpm but the CPU temperature only rose a couple of degrees to forty five point one on inverting the case so to speak resulted in a temperature barely higher than baseline forty three point six which is well within variance and error the three large intake fans and smaller exhaust fan push a huge volume of air and predictably the passive effects of heat rising are nothing compared to that if it wouldn't obstruct air flow we could flip the whole case upside down and get the same temperatures the raven o2 cools extremely well but it's because of Silverstone's huge high quality fans and short travel distance for the air that the components are able to cool decently not stack effect cooling silverstone really should just take all the credit for that one no needs market physics the rb0 to easily tops our cpu cooling charge and the only tests we've done that resulted in lower cpu temperatures were an alternate configuration of the open air cougar conquer and a test of dual 200 millimeter cooled aged 500 PE without any front panel at all the only stock case that even comes hello this is another Silverstone creation that's more recent and that is the Silverstone our l06 which uses similar pressure and fan placement configurations to the venerable Raven for GPS water temperatures the fairmark element of our test pushed GPU temperature to forty eight point three degrees Celsius that's only changed by 0.2 degrees to forty eight point one when the case was rotated again demonstrating that the act of cooling overwhelms any passive stack effect lower fan speeds raised GPU temperature to 51 point two degrees but even that's not much of a change relative to the reduction in our PM the noise reduction is significant and audible but the temperature increase is hardly appreciable the Raven is beat by one other stock case in the GPU cooling category but it's another Silverstone product the our l06 the PM o one is also almost tied and the Roseville Cullinan comes surprisingly close for a glass sided case but no other unmodified case is cooled quite as well despite the inversion the path of air across the motherboard is the same as it is in a normal case so air is pushed across the backplate and the GPU shroud more than it is directly into the heatsink if we were to cool the GPU with a radiator placed above the airflow path it would probably fare even better 3dmark generally causes higher temperatures than our torture test but the Ravens who handled it better than anything else we've tested granting that the PMA ones temperature of fifty point five degrees over ambient is within a margin of error of the RV zero to fifty point three degrees if we ever tested the RL zero six in this category I'd be a strong contender but Silverstone is unchallenged presently and in the very least two of its cases are chart-topping now the next best case after the PMA one is again the Cougar conquer which has a temperature several degrees higher we added blender rendering to our list of tests before 3d mark so the redline oh six does appear here the RB 0-2 and RL zero six operate within margin of error of one another there is neither appreciable nor measurable difference between them like the other Silverstone cases we keep mentioning the PMO one and redline oh six a large volume of air is pushed directly from the front of the motherboard to the back quickly the bottom to the top with the inverted layout in the Raven oh - that means it's directed straight into our CPU air cooler which is oriented in the same direction GPU rendering for blender is the first chart where multiple cases technically land ahead of the RB 0 - but just barely the PMO one cooler conquer and our l06 are all within margin of error of the Raven rb0 - they are functionally equivalent in performance and we do not have the test resolution to establish a clear difference again two of those are Silverstone cases with the same airflow pattern and the Cougar concur is an open-air chassis that barely insulates components at all for noise at forty four point six DBA doesn't make the RV zero to the loudest case we've tested thanks to our recent PMO one and PMO two tests but it's close the raven notes who's saving greys is the inverted layout which allows the front panel to be completely sealed while maintaining the same level of air flow as the PMO one switching the fan controllers to low reduced DBA to 36 a huge reduction that's more than worth the relatively small increase in temperature unfortunately the fan controllers are under the top panel and inaccessible from the outside so it's not something that can be adjusted on the fly for daily use the 800 ish rpm setting is much more practical so all these years later about 6 the silverstone rb0 2 is still more or less the best performer on our charts in fact at this point we're just up against potentially others Silverstone cases anyway it's the PMO one the raven o2 and the redline o6 they're more or less the top three so Silverstone's got a bit of a three-peat going and the Raven o2 although its you can't really buy it anymore they do have other raven cases we haven't looked at them but personally speaking here i really hope they just make another one of these basically the same thing maybe a couple of modern uplifts like the dr cages there are four dr cages for optical drives obviously we don't need those anymore so if I were to modernize this case like let's let's just do Steve designs a case let's let's play that game I think okay more for me than for you so if I'm designing this case I want to keep all the core features the same like the inversion I like the three bottom high-powered high pressure fans silverstone still makes them or make similar ones today so we keep this basic idea I'd say probably the next thing I'm doing is finding a way to relocate these switches to the front of the case so that it's accessible and maybe out of third speed in there depending on what fan is used USB three on the front is good USB 3.1 type C would be even better for today add one of those maybe other than that the front the top panel are really fine for the most part so next thing I'm doing because there's really not much to improve in terms of cooling at this point is probably removing at least three of these and duplicating this setup up here and that would give you a possible ten drive hard drives which would be great for a home server setup or a high-end workstation and with high-end workstations you figure a lot of the time you're using air anyway so it doesn't need to be tremendous looking clean support on the backside I would add one or two probably two SSD sleds to the back of the motherboard tray and then I would take the rear panel and give it a maybe another tenth of an inch of space so there's better cable management possibilities with ideally and added something to help with Caleb management either tie-down points or maybe a small cable management bar that could help compress the cables when there's a whole bunch of them back there especially the 24 pin because that's kind of problematic I'm not sure that there needs to be any more space at it to the bottom or the top or anything like that the only thing you're lacking and all of this is liquid clean support technically you can remove these fans and mount radiators but this case just does really well with air and air is not necessarily interesting to people who are buying high-end $200 cases sometimes they often want to go up and move now I say often it's still a really small segment of the market but I don't know maybe if you were to make eliminate some of my ideas here and instead of going high-end workstation you go high-end enthusiasts you could still keep a lot of drive cages but get rid of these bays and if needed add some height and pop a reservoir mountain there and now you can support liquid : if you want it the biggest problem that was at that point you should probably have a radiator that's whatever 180 times three is in size because that's what the that's the next challenge because those fans are just obviously not gonna cool a smaller ad do that well they're not meant for it so that's how I would do it I still really like the case I think it could still sell today especially with the performance versus everything being awful so Silverstone if you're watching and I think you are then you know consider it let's let's let's figure something out bring this one back because I really liked it and I think it is one of the best cases we've ever worked with and in fact it probably is the probably my favorite case I've personally worked with so if I had to actually choose something out of all the cases we reviewed put my own system and it's either this or on the opposite end the be quiet dark Bass Pro 900 which I just liked for other reasons it's not that great at cooling but yeah this is a big big big success in my eyes so hopefully it comes back but either way it's fun to look back at something from 2012 and also I think there was one launched in 2009 as well but yeah patreon.com slash gamers Nexus if you want helps out directly subscribe for more coverage as always we're gonna look at some more of the Silverstone and large fans pretty soon and you can go to store that gamers nexus net to pick up a shirt like this one which we just restocked thanks for watching I'll see you all next time