Gadgetory

today we've got something pretty cool to take a look at this is the silverstone Grandia series GD o 8 this is according to silverstone an amazing home theater server case with incredible storage and cooling capacity that pretty much sums it up so basically in a similar form factor to their previous home feeder cases and you know similar form factor as well as similar style meaning you've got a nice thick aluminum front bezel you've got the slick elegant looks they have managed to cram and you know cran is such an inelegant word to describe this product which isn't really fair but to cram and up to 12 hard drives and compatibility for an SSI that is like uber ATX motherboard and and long expansion slots meaning you can install any graphics card pretty much as many hard drives as you want and pretty much any motherboard you want in what is basically not much bigger than a regular htpc case so I'm very excited to take a look at this we actually go out a warning right here this is a unique product please read the included manual before proceeding with installation so I'm guessing they had to make some sort of weird arrangements with the internals all of that stuff fit with with pretty much yet you get a zero compromises configuration capability without without overdoing the size you know I mean it's one thing to design the cosmos to which can fit pretty much anything but it's the size of you know you know a plane um whereas this is you know I guess a little bit more more thoughtful not to you know rag on the cosmos to because it definitely has its place we see we've got a hard packing foam usually I prefer to see the softer foams just because they tend to take a bit more of a beating before they yield however this one apparently arrived without any difficulty it helps that silverstone actually uses a higher quality outside carton box than most case manufacturers do yeah i'll show you guys can see they use a double wall here and then they this um this actually improves puncture resistance just to finish that they use on the outside as well so it's it's less of a concern for me with a silverstone box than it would be with someone else you do it yeah this is really not that big compared to something like an LC 17 or you know like one of their one of their staple products that doesn't have this enormous compatibility um sorry about that guys battery died you know the drill so let's start with the outside of the case because you know silverstone is certainly well known for elegant beautiful cases and this is definitely no extension extension it is an extension of that principle and it is no exception so you can see here we've got just a gorgeous brushed aluminum front now brushed aluminum is a bit of a double-edged sword for me because i'm always afraid to touch it because it tends to get gunked-up if you get your fingerprints all over it but as long as you put it somewhere where it's going to be relatively safe it'll look beautiful for years to come we've got our power and reset switches as well as our as well as on an LED indicator on the front we've got two five and a quarter inch base so you can put up to a couple different drives in here if you want two USB 3.0 ports as well as front headphones and microphone if you were going to use this as like a desktop tower on your case and it looks just wonderful i love the finish that they put on their cases on the side we've got two 120 millimeter cooling fan slots including as you can see right here they're straight push really push go give me a second there we go nevermind I got it okay yes you push it and then you take it off so including an easily removable dan filter that has and this is something they explained to me at CES this year this is apparently the most optimal baffle to place in front of a fan in order to have as little impact as possible on airflow while reducing the audible noise of the fan so there you go you can see Silverstone spent didn't the guys I was talking to were like yeah we spent a really really long time on this trying absolutely everything so there you go that is the result of months of engineering that baffle which apparently will make your fans perform better and be less noisy so you can see the 120 millimeter cooling fan slots I'm just going to go ahead and put this back on now you can actually screw it into place if you want so you can see there's a couple screw holes there or you can just leave it slidable just like that let's move around to the other side where we find oh sorry it's not super heavy I was just kind of kind of awkward so we're we have another 120 millimeter fan so this one you pull off including the same baffle it doesn't include the fans by default but I mean most people who are going to be buying high super high-end cases in my experience are usually finding their own fans that they prefer as well so there's not much benefit to including basic fans with with a case like this here we've got three 120 millimeter fans now this is also compatible with 101 123 80s or six 60 millimeter fans should you so desire something to go ahead and pull these off yeah these just snap off so you can see the wide variety of mounting holes that are there on the bottom of the case you can see we have two fans installed out of the factory giving you overall positive air pressure inside the case this is one of the key concepts that Silverstone has really been working on over the last couple years actually and that is positive airflow so positive or positive air pressure rather positive air pressure keeps the keeps that doesn't keep dust from accumulating inside your case but it reduces the amount of dust that can get into your case because if you have negative air pressure that is to say more exhaust fans than intake fans what happens is dust will tend to get sucked in places where there aren't fans whereas if you have more intake than exhaust it'll tend to have just a you know a passive little bit of airflow out of all those little gaps in the corners of the case which can keep dust from being sucked into them as long as your intakes are filtered that is on the fans that you're using for intake otherwise it's not helpful at all okay so on the back we've got seven plus one configuration for PCI slots you can use up to a fan control or whatever else but it means we can't support excel ATX and other boards in spite of the wide motherboard compatibility we've got our standard sort of bottom mounted power supply okay and then IO as well as two 80 millimeter fan slots now let's go ahead and open it up and I am very very curious to see the inside of this especially so that I can know what merits that special warning about making sure you read the manual before trying to build a system in this case because it must be it must be pretty complicated there I mean you know it's probably not complicated but it might be a little bit tricky like you know you'll go ahead and you'll install all your hard drives to find out that if you install the hard drives first you can't install your motherboard or something like that I got a couple vibration dampeners here so those guys press down on the handles when you're holding up to 12 hard drives at a time you do need handles even when we did our little build in the array r2 with the Windows Home Server six hard drives and one go is precarious you want to make sure that you're holding it very securely because if you drop them I mean even if they're not dead even if they still work you can never trust them with your data again anyway so those little pads hold these down in place so that they don't cause any vibration you can also see there's anti vibration padding here as well just to keep the hard drive cage here from transferring vibrations to the top panel other than that the case is pretty much one solid piece so yeah if you want to fit anything wider than standard txon here it looks like you're going to have to play some funny games with removing these fans in order to get the extra space for the motherboard it looks like this whole mounting system thing for it actually comes out so hold on a second let's saw you're giving a minute with the manual actually I'll just I'll be able to tell you guys more about this let me start by saying that this case is probably one of the most confusing ones I've encountered but it also has the best manual I have ever encountered so in spite of it being a black and white manual and look how thick it is this manual is like head and shoulders better than any other case I've ever encountered so it tells you there's an installation guide and the installation guide isn't just like how to put in a PCI Express graphics card no no the installation guide is step by step one by one what order to install the components in to make sure that everything will fit gives you little tips and tricks about make sure that there's nothing interfering with this particular spot right here while you're putting in this thing so it shows you all the installation guide II stuff it explains how to use things like these whoops these which are used to mount a hard drive in this little tiny gap over here but more on that later it also it gives you recommendations for a bunch of different components so they explain okay well if you're going to use a dual here how many case manufacturers bother to tell this tell you this if you're going to use a dual CPU motherboard use one with the CPU socket in the top right corner because that will give you better compatibility with this case that kind of tip is fantastic to have as an end user and most manufacturers don't really bother to tell you stuff like that they expect you to figure it out on your own but it's in here very very cool they also tell you you know if you want to put a high end graphics card here you're going to have to not install hard drives here here and here and you know just component size limitations they have a whole big schwack of stuff about this make sure you use this kind of right angle cable as opposed to this kind of right angle cable fan configurations what can fit according to what kind of a motherboard you're using a 6 by 60 ml fans is for the SSI configuration alright recommended coolers graphics cards what direction the air flow should go in in order to optimize for your case this is this is just like great stuff okay so let's move on and let's actually look at the case itself so you can pull this out with the two handles and it'll be heavier when there are drives in it but I want to first explain where all the drives go so here you can put three three and a quarter at three and a half inch drives these won't interfere with anything they're just across from the power supply so no matter what kind of graphics cards you have or whatever other hooha that will be just fine you can then put another up to four here depending on the orientation you can turn them either this way or this way as long as you don't have a super long graphics card installed and if this is for like media storage then that's probably the kind of configuration you go with you can then and this is awesome put a an 8-3 to half inch drive like over here so you actually run the static connect a bolide sits like like this I believe nope like this sorry guys it's really tricky so it sits like this so you can just barely access them and run the cables to it and so that's eight three and a half inch drives you can put two two and a half inch drives oh yeah and it uses this adapter over there so that bolts to the side of the case which then screws into the drive meaning it's not sticking right up against the case with a risk of shorting out so we've got two two and a half inch drive bays here and you run the cables to those up here as well and then finally the two five and a quarter inch bays which you can also use to install more three and a half inch drives or more two and a half inch drives should you see fit so that is up to 12 total drives just with this innovative piece of metal so these guys are fully dampened these ones are partially dampened you can see there's dampening here but they had to cut this out so that there's space for graphics cards and it's fully dampened up here so you're still putting it up to four screws per drive which is fine these are not damp in their optical drive so that's just fine and this guy over here is not dampened if you really need you know ten drives and you've already replaced both of your five and a quarter inch drive so the hard drives then you can put it in there and you'll be happy I hope with that result because that's already kind of ridiculous hah frontcourt front panel connectors so here we find pretty much standard fare we've got our internal USB 3 and they do include an adapter in case your motherboard does not support USB 3 of the N internal header just do that alternately you can source one of those other adapters I actually grabbed one I don't know what I didn't fit so whatever you can source adapters that allow you to turn one of these into a pass-through to the to the back of the case as well and you can just run it through PCI slot okay we've got our front power and reset switches as well as power LED so that front LED and then we've also got our hard drive LED so two LEDs on the front we've got our front HD audio and then we've got pretty much just the connectors for our fans so we include three 120 millimeter fans although you can install just a whack load of other fans so I made a mistake and I said you could install a 120 millimeter fan here at the beginning of the video you cannot that is a filter for the bottom of the power supply so you can install up to five 120 millimeter fans if you take this guy out and then you can also do right use where you can do this is that part where you can do the multiple different configurations so if you want to do the 80s or the 60 mils depending on what kind of a motherboard you have in this is your standard ATX width and your standard ATX length so you do have to remove some of this stuff or make it more low-profile in order to make room for it I think the inside is fairly self-explanatory once you get past this which is not self-explanatory at all but now that I get it is actually still fairly easy to use so you install everything in it you install your components in here you do like kind of a test fit where you look at it really carefully as you as you make your way down and then you have successfully cramped or well Silverstone has successfully helped you cram more hardware than I would have even thought possible in a small space as well possible so whether you need dual CPUs and you know 64 128 gigs of ram and your media PC or not now you can thank you for watching this unboxing and first look on Linus tech tips and don't forget to subscribe