We seriously can't get enough of SilverStone's new line of Cases: the Fortress and Raven 2 series.
There are endless cases you can choose from, and to be honest, a lot of PC cases are just terrible. There are some that merely look good on the outside, but the insides are poorly designed. Bad air flow, bad internal structure, poor quality craftsmanship--there are a lot of companies out there that just want to make a quick buck.
We're not about cutting corners here.
After my last article about SilverStone's Fortress case, some of you asked for more pictures of the Raven 2 case. Here there are, including a shot of how air flows out of the unit. The motherboard's backplane faces upwards in the case, and there is a standard 120mm fan that provides exhaust flow.
Both the Fortress and Raven 2 have an upwards cable management system. Both cases have a top lid that covers the cables and they're routed to the rear of the case through an opening. The top lid provides roughly 3 inches of moving room, so you won't have to worry about over bending thick cables. The motherboard mount actually seats the board an inch down from the top surface of the case.
The back side of both the Fortress and Raven 2 case contains mounting braces for a 2.5-inch HDD or SSD drive. On the Raven 2, you can see that SilverStone has mounted an SSD from OCZ.
Internally, the Fortress has a vertically mounted HDD SATA back-plane system whereas the Raven 2 does not. While the Raven 2 looks great in stealth-black, the Fortress has a slightly better internal design. Nevertheless, these two cases would win our Computex's Choice award, if we had one. Instead, we're giving SilverStone the Tom's Hardware 2009 Excellence award.
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2rockerrb , June 8, 2009 3:17 AMTy for this article. I have long argued that the case is the most important part of the computer. Buy a good case and you can upgrade it for life whenever you can.
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2glenster , June 7, 2009 11:08 PMThe Fortress supplies a conventional silver look reviewers have particularly admired, and the new Raven is subdued in that direction and admired, too. If you want a bargain from the Core i7 920 or such, you want it quiet and cool, and these should excel at it. You don't want to spend a lot more for something hotter and louder for the privilege of having something made of the same thing they make beer cans out of that says "I spent too much to show I find beauty in banality." Besides, I tend to look at the monitor myself....
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2anonymous@guest , June 7, 2009 10:32 PMExcellent at being cool and quiet, now with a hole behind the motherboard tray, cable management, etc., and a lot less expensive than the Corsair. I probably won't need so many places for hard drives as the Fortress was made for. I hope Silverstone releases them soon so we can see acoustic and thermal test results.
