Gadgetory

hey everyone this is Steve from gamers Nexus tonight and today we are looking at silver stones Raven are v02 enthusiasts class gaming case as always I want to talk about some of the hard specs before hitting on my opinions and the objective performance data which is at the end of this review quick note this case has been out for a little while it was recently revamped for USB 3.0 support but it is a really important case for thermal benching and I want to get it on the benchmark so we can compare it against the upcoming rv0 four case which should be out sometime in the next few months this case is actually really unique it's probably one of the most interesting ones we've reviewed to date and it's all because of how a silverstone focuses on cooling performance overall else when we met with silverstone at CES i asked for their thoughts on the industries trend toward cable management and ease of installation features and kind of stepping away from cooling innovations and without missing a beat they kind of countered me by asking how often do you build a system and in general that answer is once unless your reviewers but in general you're building at one time then you're kind of done with it so in Silverstone's design philosophy cooling performance is the primary objective with aesthetics and ease of installation following thereafter and it does make sense so the Raven has historically done some insanely cool stuff with motherboard rotation and positive air cooling this is not news and that legacy continues with the rv0 to that be something or other that we're looking at today the board is actually rotated 90 degrees so all the i/o is exposed in the top instead of the rear of the case and there are three massive 180 millimeter fans mounted in the bottom using positive pressure cooling to force air up and out of the case which is a stack effect basically physics phenomenon it's as simple as the the hot air will rise because the Pratt the air density difference between the inside and the outside of the case due to the thermal differential this forces the air to pass straight through the CPU cooler and the video card heatsink without any obstruction from like say drive bays which normally are in front of your front intake between the intake and you know your parts you actually want to cool or all your drives and that's a huge wall that you really don't want to have between your cooling and your components they've removed that by making this all bottom mounted intake fans and with that in mind the RV zo2 has only one top mounted 120 millimeter exhaust fan that is the only exhaust fan and that helps vent heat from the CPU but other than that the case is entirely cooled by just bottom fans naturally forcing air out the top meshes the power supply is mounted in the top corner of the case with its fan covered by a dust filter in the rear position externally the actual power cable the external power cable routes between the top panel mesh along along with all the other i/o cables and it emerges out the back of the case and this means that your accessibility to USB ports fan speed control the power supply toggle switch and other i/o is fairly limited being that you have to remove the top panel to mess with those ports from i/o includes two 3.5 milimeter jacks for audio two USB 3.0 ports and that's really about it other than the switches and this is a the USB 3.0 ports are of course complete with a header so if you don't have a USB 3.0 header on your board it's a good idea to buy an adapter of some kind otherwise you're going to have to remove the top panel every time you want to mess with USB ports so on that note you may have heard me rattle off mention about fans but you control a second ago the rv0 2 has a three fan speed controller to two different speeds for three fans that can switch between two basic high and low settings we tested the performance of each of these settings and I'll show you that in a bit one of the biggest advantages to the rb0 2 is its resilience to dust because the case uses positive pressure cooling which effectively means that only air intake is in the bottom with air being expelled from all the cracks in the case and the mesh is everywhere in the top that is so there's almost no dust accumulation anywhere except in the bottom filters which are easily cleansed that's because the air is being forced out everywhere else so the only place where dust really to go is the bottom and then moving to the aesthetic side of things were kind of blasting through a good deal of topics here on the aesthetic side of things the case is pretty long given its motherboard orientation but is otherwise fairly normal-sized it's not super tall like the 820 or 630 it's fairly normal it is long like the armored evolution if you're familiar with that case the glass side panel is found on the right side of the case so a little bit different than normally it's the opposite side of what we're used to and the panel looks very good I'll have to give it that it shows off the core components very well doesn't show anything ugly and really the only downside is you may have to reposition how you know where you place your PC if you want to show it off properly the top panel of a Glee resembles the namesake raven and is separated into two mesh panels within that that allow easy air movement from the bottom through the top of the case so very good there and that's without letting a ton of noise through because it's not like the whole side panel is meshed like again on the armor evolution and before jumping into performance benchmarks I want to talk a little bit about cable management in this case it's pretty crucial to air flow that you take your time to properly route cables with this one we always recommend cable management but with this set up blocking bottom intake has a significantly larger impact on cooling potential than in a case where you rely on side and front intake because Silverstone doesn't have all the ease of installation features that some other cases have like NZXT tees high-end products I've mentioned it took a little bit more effort than normally to successfully conceal and route all the cables and in in my full review I use a highway analogy to explain cable routing with this case you'll want to run all the cables effectively within the same channel along the rear side of the board tray since the cutouts are basically present everywhere else there like riddled through it so the fans the motherboard power the PCI Express power and and basically your SATA connections if you have and they all needs to take different exits we'll call it on our so called highway of cables so that you can you can reduce clutter and actually allow the rear panel to close otherwise it'll be too fat and you can stuff some of the skinnier cables between the bottom fans to hide them excess molar mullux and SATA power can be hidden in the last drive bay and there are a couple other tricks I discuss in the review I'd recommend taking advantage of Silverstone's built-in SATA data and power connectors for the first drive dock if you're on only one drive it'll eliminate the need for a SATA power cable and reduce clutter a bit and it's a little bit more trustworthy I guess more durable than your average crappy SATA data connection and power connection which are prone to breaking because they're a terrible standard so silverstone big props to them for adding that in the RV zero two doesn't have met that many tie anchors like for cable ties on the backside of the board so unfortunately you may need to improvise in some cases i stuffed the skinny zip tie through one of the unused standoff mounts for instance and that helped distribute cables and allow the rear panel to close a bit easier and alright with all that stuff out of the way let's spend a second on performance here Silverstone's rep asserted that he'd be surprised if the RV zero two wasn't the best performing case on our bench and lo and behold it's the best performing case on our bench so i guess good for them our testing methodology is to find foley in the article below but the short of it is that these measurements are delta T over ambient so the RV zero two kept the CPU at around fifty one point eight Celsius on the high fans at ins one under a hundred percent maximum load large FFTs and for low settings it was I believe around fifty feet point three Celsius which the fan rpm basically drops to seven hundred for that speed setting rose whales are armored evolution is finally dethroned on our bench for CPU cooling without our v02 is now the highest performing case we've ever tested including in the enthusiast class which is filled in right now with the bantam cases and in fact it's it's just the highest-performing case we've ever tested period for CPU coin let's look at GPU performance it's not quite as impressive here as the cpu performance but as with all cases we test the GPU Thermal tests have pretty big IFS involved it's my hypothesis that the RB 0 2 would perform substantially better for GPU cooling with either multiple video cards or with a larger video card or one that basically makes use of a different fan design like a squirrel cage fan or multi fan can figure a ssin for our small single fan normal fan 7850 there's just no big advantage I think that's probably because the air channels are really just fully saturated already and the cases air flow dynamics aren't going to make a big impact on a small cards cooling potential so overall looking at everything we just talked about I'm really happy with the case I it builds really nicely the cable management is a little bit of effort but it looks good once it's done it cools insanely well and it's just really cool overall like the actual design I mean that's very interesting because of the way the motherboard is a little bit of an annoyance when you're trying to access USB that you know if you've already saturated your front ports and need more that's a little annoying it's not so annoying that it stopped me from buying the case if you know what I'm saying I think it's like 180 to 200 bucks right now so that's a pretty big investment you're basically looking at a couple of other options when you're in that your the phantom 630 is like right there phantom 820 is not that far off if it's on sale especially and then rosewall's impending throne case will be in that same range as well of course Corsair has one of their 500 cases might be the 550d I'm not sure off the top of my head one of those cases is right up there in the 150 range so definitely a lot of good choices to pick from I'm a big fan of this case if you're looking for pure performance definitely pick it up if you're looking for something interesting and unique definitely pick it up but if you don't think you need like insane overclocking performance and let's be honest most of us don't need that then you can probably get away with just buying 100 200 thirty dollar case and you'll be just fine in terms of performance so don't overspend just because you think you need more cooling for a basic overclock only get it if you really think it fits something specific that you like or if you want just period the best cooling possible in the enthusiast class and that's all I have to say about that one I don't have a ton of negatives here just the couple ones I already mentioned about accessibility so Silverstone definitely breaks all the rules with its Raven series of products I'm pretty happy with it and I will see you all next time peace