SilverStone RAVEN RV02-E Case
Feb 9th, 2011 | By SimonIn order to open up the case, you must pop the top bezel off and remove the thumbscrews. The side panel can then be lifted up and out.
The RV02-E is a spacious case. To the left we have space for five 5.25″ devices and five 3.5″ drives. On the bottom we see the three 180mm Air Penetrator intake fans and just above them a large cavity for a motherboard up to 12″x11″. This isn’t E-ATX size but it’s certainly large enough for most enthusiasts.
The three 180mm Air Penetrator can be individually controlled from the rear I/O panel. Each fan has a high and low speed option. The 120mm exhaust fan has no control. Each of the Air Penetrators has a filter to reduce the amount of dust sucked into your case. A little tug on the handle and they come right out for cleaning.
When it comes to the 5.25″ and 3.5″ bays, there’s nothing complicated about them. The 5.25″ bays are of typical design but the 3.5″ bays have plastic cages in which your hard drives screw on to. SilverStone has added rubber grommets to help dampen any vibration that could be transferred from the hard drive to case.
Rotating the case around to the back we see plenty of space for routing cables and the location for a 2.5″ SSD. The large opening, centered around the motherboard, allows you to install backplates without having to remove the motherboard itself – an excellent feature. I would have loved to see a full set of hot-swap cables provided, they can be purchased as an extra from SilverStone.
The rest of the inside is completely open for your hardware so let’s start installing things! You can read through the installation guide to see what SilverStone recommends for each component or you can fly by the seat of your pants. The installation process is fairly simple and I’ll make a few brief points about each step and let you learn from my experience.
The first thing I decided to install was the power supply. The power supply is mounted vertically so you need to hold the PSU up while you screw it in. SilverStone included a Velcro strap to help carry the weight of the power supply but I found it didn’t help. Most power supplies have a glossy finish and so they would just slide down the strap. I found the best thing is to just carry your power supply in one hand and work a screwdriver with the other. You could also tip the case on the side and screw it in, that would likely work just as well.
To permanently support the weight of a power supply on 4 screws isn’t the best idea and so SilverStone has designed a bracket in which you mount below the PSU to create a small platform. The bracket is not pre-installed because there is no standard length of a power supply. Along the side of the case are a series of holes which the bracket mounts to. You just have to find the closest one that fits and hope your PSU will sit on it.
With the power supply out of the way, I’ll move onto the 5.25″, 3.5″ and 2.5″ devices. The front bezel for each 5.25″ optical drive can be popped out from inside the cage. The SilverStone guide instructs you to remove the entire bezel but if you stick your hand inside the case and feel for the tabs of each bay you can push them right out. This will save some time and let you get on with using your computer and not assembling it. A typical optical drive will slide in from the front and is secured with up to four screws on the side.
The 3.5″ cages are easily removed and hard drives are just as easy to install into the cage. It takes a tiny bit of effort to line up the holes of the rubber grommets but having this feature to reduce vibration and noise is well worth it.
If you plan on using a solid state drive or any 2.5″ hard drive, it must be mounted to the SSD bracket in order to be mounted onto the case. In some instances an SSD will have its own 2.5″ to 3.5″ adapter but by using the included bracket you free yourself one 3.5″ drive. The bracket is easy to work with and takes no though at all to assemble.
The last piece to install is my motherboard. I pre-installed the RAM, GPU and heatsink so it was just a matter of dropping in the motherboard and putting a couple screws in. The RV02-E only comes pre-installed with six motherboard studs on the tray and I would recommend installing another three to be able to fully support your board and hardware. I said it before and I’ll say it again, the interior of the RV02-E is incredibly spacious. My ATI HD4850X2 and Arctic Cooling Freezer 13 fit comfortably inside.
You can see in the above photo that the three 180mm Air Penetrator will provide ample cooling to my system. One fan for the hard drives, one fan for my video card and one fan for my CPU! As a bonus I also have the 120mm exhaust fan at the top. Cable management is definitely not my forte but with the RV02-E it is very easy to run all the excess cables to the back where they are out of sight. With fewer cables around the hardware we’ll see better air flow and hopefully improvement in cooling performance.
It looks like a mess in the back but there is still plenty of space to work on any HSF back plate or route cables to the hard drives. I was still able to slap on the sides without the panels bulging out too much. After routing power, network and DVI cable out through the top bezel I was ready to start up my newly assembled PC.
