Well Silverstone is not a real case looker for a while in my books but with the new style of case that Silverstone is making I want to really dig my eyes into, so meet with the new Raven. Being one of the new styles of cases for an enthusiast grade, we could think of the change in the overall design and the serious changes in the feature given into a case. But with Silverstone we could think of anything larger than an E-ATX form facto case and with all black colouration design we could think of an ultimate use of hold allot of stuff.
So the Raven as we can say is a very large and a very heavy case with all the whistles and bells I could think of but most of the time I could over do with the features of it, so without further to do the rave case comes with a full aluminium chassis body and a door that swing wide open to show all of the external optical drives, but the most part where the Raven looks much better than any other case I could think of, the internal chassis shows that the case has the motherboard layout changed from the I/O from being at the back is now at the top of the cases design method. So with all of the expansion slots and where you jack in the USB ports and the mouse and keyboard are all the same as you jack in the eSATA port and the mic and audio ports. So the board layout is then spun 90 degrees upward to make the phase cooling of the case more effective rather than the board in the usual back of the case so hot air could move quite easily from the top with no help with the fans whatsoever, but I see some flaws to the design if you think about cable management in the case you should look elsewhere with the case littered with spots where the cables like the power supply and SATA cables can be free hanging and even invading the way of a fan or the look of the board itself, se they really did not perfected the case yet; but the change of elevation of the rest five 5.21in optical bays and 6 SATA ports make a good overall frontal expansion set plus the PSU is also in another chamber so it does not invade the way of the rest of the components.
The cooling performance of the case runs ad in the passive test show that the case goes well in idle mode and also in load times keeping the temps at relatively 50 to 60 degrees but when you go active cooling, you expect a 30% decrease in temps and it really did 24/56 degrees in idle and load. But sometime when you ask the price of the thing and the weight it does really hurt your back pocket as well has hurt your back literally weighting at 25Kg in fully loaded hardware and the price way out of the range for budget users. But at $265 it could pay a bit more for the case.
