Silverstone's Raven RV04 Case Pictured
Images of Silverstone's upcoming flagship chassis have been presented.
Some images have surfaced of Silverstone's upcoming Raven RV04 chassis, the soon-to-be flagship chassis from Silverstone. Evidently, this chassis is an evolution of the Raven RV03.
The chassis has changed in a number of ways, mainly on the interior. The exterior of the case is now more curvy and lacks the chrome highlights. The biggest change, though, is the motherboard orientation. The RV03 had a motherboard that was rotated 90 degrees from the orientation that we're accustomed to, but the RV04 rotates the motherboard 180 degrees and flips it to the other side of the case so that the I/O is still accessible from the back. The motherboard tray also supports up to E-ATX motherboard sizes.
In terms of flexibility, the Raven RV04 will offer room for two optical drives, seven 3.5" drives, as well as four 2.5" drives. Cooling will be executed by two 180 mm front fans as well as a 120 mm rear fan. Graphics cards will be able to be as long as 337 mm, with CPU cooling towers as tall as 165 mm. Front I/O includes a headphone jack, microphone jack, and two USB 3.0 ports.
The case will weigh in at a massive 11 kg, which lets us suspect that it's mainly built out of SECC steel. 
Two versions will be released, the SST-RV04B, and the SST-RV04B-W, which has an acrylic window in the side panel. At the time of writing, there is no word on pricing or availability.
My apologies, it's not BTX, it's backwards-atx. Got the two confused.
Hey, I'm the one who first made the mistake; you just ran with my idea.
Wish my case was that light.
Hey, I'm the one who first made the mistake; you just ran with my idea.
I worked with BTX machines (Pentium D, etc) for a long, long time. I was thinking the same as you, and I didn't even notice that my case was reverse ATX! Lol
The sideways design of the older Raven case may have had some issues with some video card cooler designs.
this is a sucky change. they should have called it something else.
Not so much.
BTX not only has to do with the 'backward' mounting, but also has a lot to do with the board layout, as well as the mounting points on the motherboard tray.
The biggest thing about BTX is the focus on cooling. This was back in the day of the old hot Pentium 4 processors, and manufacturers were having serious issues with cooling things while staying under a specific dB envelope. So BTX came out which put the processor, NB, SB, sometimes feature chips, and the primary graphics slot all in a single line so that you could have 2 large fans in a push-pull configuration with as little obstruction as possible, and remove the need for specific CPU, northbridge, and GPU fans. RAM, while not in direct flow of this 'wind tunnel', was also mounted in a front-to-back configuration above the CPU and NB/SB chips rather than the normal ATX configuration which has RAM in a top-to-bottom orientation which breaks airflow.
While backward mounted, the IO was still on the top of the case, rather than the bottom like a backward ATX setup.
I loved the BTX standard, but it never really caught on for consumer use. Dell is the only manufacturer to really use BTX on a lot of equipment, but HP has used (or at least borrowed from) the layout on some things as well. Apple desktops (cheese-grater Power Macs) also borrowed a lot of things from the design philosophy, but still quite different in that they put all of the rear IO on headders which connects to the front of the board, and then they cram all of the CPU and GPU resources next to eachother more like a traditional ATX layout, while most of the rest of the layout follows BTX design.
As it stands now, I don't think you can get a consumer BTX motherboard that will run anything faster than a late gen Pentium 4, or perhaps an early Core2Duo because the format died out when die shrinks finally made things run cooler, and extreme cooling methods were no longer a necessity.
At any rate, this looks like a great case. Very glad to see high end gamer cases finally growing up a bit and looking cleaner and more professional rather than an odd hodge-podge of rectangles slapped together. Only question I have is why did they design a high end case with the PSU mount on top?
That being said, it is sad that BTX never caught on.
What does a 180 degree rotation get you besides making it so heatpipe coolers on graphics cards don't work? Silverstone had better have a big warning about using videocards with heatpipes.
Also, this new Raven is the ugliest one yet I think. The RV02 wasn't bad.