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.