Silverstone Raven RV01 ATX Chassis Review

Silverstone have set out to  break from convention here and while turning the motherboard 90 degrees seems like a design gimmick at first, it does actually bring some tangible benefits to the build. The first of these is that heavy graphics cards seem to put a more linear strain on the motherboard PCI slots, preventing the cards from drooping downwards. Next we have airflow, Silverstone are experts when it comes to cooling and here they’re using one of the most basic facts about heat, heat rises! By turning the motherboard we see that the GPU now exhausts upwards and the chances of heat leaving the chassis and moving away from it are much improved, helped even further by the two huge 180mm fans in the bottom of the chassis that help keep everything flowing nicely. Pulling cold air in at the bottom and exhausting it out the top, simple but very effective.

There is room for more cooling of course and I was able to install our 120mm radiator in the top, you can actually hang a radiator from the back of the chassis by removing the hard cover with a screw driver, it won’t look too pretty though unless you’re using a large custom radiator and our Corsair H100i was far from compatible in this configuration, in all honesty it doesn’t seem like a great idea to even bother with that, I would suggest you pick a chassis that is better suited to large radiators if that is what you really want.

This chassis is a little bigger than your average full tower and I was expecting it to offer extensive storage bays, huge amounts of fan mounts and extensive cable management, but it really doesn’t unfortunately. 6 HDD bays is nothing out of the ordinary really but it is more than enough for most people. There are no extra fan mounts but thankfully this doesn’t appear to be an issue as Silverstone have designed the airflow to be well-balanced already. The cable management is really poor in my opinion, I would have loved to have seen a few more cut-outs, not to mention make the existing ones larger and fit them with grommets, a chassis this big with a big window and the ability to hold a lot of high-end components would benefit greatly in terms of design and airflow if you could route the cables better. This is of course no big surprise as the main design of this chassis is a 2008 model and five years ago cable management just wasn’t that big of a deal, something this has since been addressed in more recent models such as the RV03.

The design was meant to look like a stealth fighter plane and they’ve succeeded with that perfectly, the almost evil matt black finish is flawless and it gives a really imposing vibe to the chassis, as too does its general size, shape and bizarre layout.

I’m happy to award the RV01 with our innovation award, but I really wanted to see this earn out Editors Choice. It is innovative in the sense that it’s something new, it’s different and over a refreshing change from all the normal boxes out there and that’s what I love about it, but without more HDD bays and better cable management or rad support it just falls short of being an Editors Choice.

Pros

• Unique design
• Great air cooling
• Great support for larger graphics card, motherboards and power supplies

Cons

• One of the most expensive chassis on the market
• Could offer more storage options given overall size of chassis
• Cable management could be improved (although excusable given age of design)

eTeknix says: “If you love the design of this chassis then I don’t think any award is going to change your mind one way or the other, you either love it or you hate it and for those that want something different and a little crazy then there really isn’t much out there that offers something as unique as the RV01. When people see this chassis their response is often “wow” and its easily one of the coolest chassis designs on the market.”