Silverstone Raven RV05 Case Review

It is not every day that you can flip a case over and find the bottom fully open and covered with a fine mesh filter.  This new filter material is very unique in that it is not only thinner than most filters but also comes with a finer mesh to allow better cooling and trap more dust that would otherwise make it into the case.  Given that the intake pulls air from the floor having a good filter is a must.

We mentioned how the RV05 is quite small and to achieve the unique design with a rotated motherboard a few things needed to be removed.  The most notable of these is any semblance of an external drive bay.  Yep, all of the 5.25” drive bays have been removed and  Internal bays have been reduced to only only support two 3.5” drives.

To see what that looks like we have removed one of the side panels to show the inside.  In some ways this case gets back to the basics of what is really needed in a modern computer.

Removing the back panel exposes the area behind the motherboard tray where many of us run our cables to keep them out of the way.  On the back of the motherboard tray you will find two 2.5” drive trays perfect for SSDs and smaller form factor hard drives.

Below the 2.5” drive trays is an odd looking plastic tray used to hold a single slim slot drive optical.  Slim drives have been quite popular in many Silverstone case designs dating back to the Sugo SG08.  While we feel including a single optical drive is more of a political compromise to counteract the removal of the 5.25” drive bays it is still a welcome addition. 

Of course you will hardly know the drive exists given how creatively the Silverstone designers have camouflaged the opening and even went so far as to fill the slot with a perfectly matched rubber plug.  In fact we didn’t even know it was there until the plug mistakenly got dislodged.