Silverstone Raven RVZ01 Mini-ITX Chassis Review

Introduction

Silverstone have long been the masters of small form factor PC cases, in fact in many ways their chassis are some of the best in the world no matter what form factor you look at. Their Raven series is one of the most robust, versatile and our right cool ranges of gaming chassis products ever created and while they’ve often been focused on large full-tower and ultra-tower designs, their latest incarnation looks set to shrink things down with a product that wants to take a seat in the premium real estate under your TV.

With the sudden increase in demand and popularity of small form factor gaming builds, especially with the current interesting in SteamBox builds, there are countless new chassis product hitting the market to fill the void. Sure there has always been a market for these smaller cases, starting off with HTPC builds, NAS boxes, media streaming systems, and in the last few years people wanting to use things such as Steams BigScreen Mode. SteamOS however looks set to unify a lot of these features, giving you a native OS that is tailored to gaming on the big screen, and Silverstone are going all in with the RVZ01, which they hope will be the ultimate choice for a self-built SteamBox, or just any compact gaming rig.

Packed full of features, the RVZ01 looks promising both on paper, and just from the few PR photos we’ve seen floating around the web, as well as the samples we saw kicking around at CES 2014. With support for large and powerful graphics cards in a chassis of this size, where half-size cards are often the maximum limit, as well as a big focus on air cooling thanks to slim fans, room for a few hard drives, slim optical drive and making good use of the SFX power supply form factor (much smaller than ATX power supplies). As far as specifications are concerned, this chassis sounds pretty epic, so let’s get right to the good stuff and see what else it has to offer.

In the box I found a decent selection of fitting components, such as a two way fan splitter, handy given that many Mini-ITX motherboards only have a couple of fan connection points. There is a dust filter kit for a 120mm fan mount, and a set of brackets, rubber feet and pads to help you mount the chassis in both vertical and horizontal formats. Of course you will also find a nice selection of high quality screws to help you install all major components such as motherboard, PSU and hard drives. Finally there was also an extra Raven logo, this one is curved from left to right and is perfect for when the chassis is stood vertically, while the one that is pre-installed looks better horizontally.