Silverstone Raven RVZ01 Review

The Build

If you’ve been a bit confused up to now as to how all this hangs together then building into the RVZ01 should help you grasp things a little more firmly.  First to go into the case is the M-ITX motherboard, sitting as it does immediately beside the cage that houses your chosen SFX PSU.  There’s plenty of room for cables but no cable management to speak of, and although there are no cable tie points, you are going to want to lash things together to keep it as tidy as possible, especially as the cables supplied from the front I/O are about three times longer than they need to be.  We’ve mounted an HDD on op of the PSU cage and as you can see there’s no a lot of space between it and where the roof will be.  Still, in an enclosure as compact as his we accept that compromises must be made, and so do Silverstone, recommending that you put your OS on a more heat tolerant SSD and use a low RPM HDD for your data.

     

 

Slotting our trusty old ASUS EN 8800GT into the GPU bracket does at least show just how much room there is to be had.  provided your card’s not longer than 13″ and no wider than 5.88″ it’ll fit just fine and although if you’re building a steam machine you’re not likely to need to wedge a Titan or a R9 290X in here should you choose to you’ll be pleased to know it will fit just fine.

     

 

We have to admit to being a bit concerned as to how well the GPU mounting bracket approach would work, being more than a little concerned with regards to its robustness as it required the PCI connection on the bottom of your GPU to first be attached to the extender before being engaged with the PCI socket on the motherboard.  We are however very pleased to report that our concerns were totally unfounded with the whole process being simple and straightforward.  We hardly ever needed to refer to the instructions (Ok so we did a few times but come on, we’re not turning our Man card in for this little infringement)

     

 

Although we haven’t mounted a PSU it’s clear to see just how little room there is for cable management in here.  All the cables you can see are purely those from the front I/O and already things are pretty crowded.  When we turn to CPU cooling, with only 83mm of space on tap it’s petty much a given that you’re going to be looking at a low profile air cooler, such as Silverstone’s own NT06 Pro.  In the instructions provided with the RVZ01 Silverstone do point out that with 86mm of room it is also possible to get a 120mm rad and fan along with the CPU water block into the space directly above the CPU.  Good luck with that!