Unless you knew what you were looking for on first glance you wouldn’t think anything odd with the internal layout of the Raven. Sure, there is a dual chamber design with a “sub floor” delineating the PSU area from the motherboard area but this is a SilverStone case so this is not exactly out of the ordinary. When you take a closer look, some things do start to stick out as being odd like the “lack” of a rear exhaust fan and inclusion of a top exhaust fan. As with the Purloined Letter it’s only when you take a really close look that the big things start to stand out, even though they are right there in front of you all along. Then and only then do you start to see the genius in this lay out.
The genius in this layout is the logical conclusion of a theory which has been unraveled in real time and in metal for all to see. The theory is actual very simple and real “why didn’t we think of that” kind of deal. This theory is goes like this: “heat rises, any board which gets in the way of the heat rising (say a GPU w/ its card above it in a normal layout) will block this heat from rising and cause the item to run even hotter. Since heat rises best with no blockages, the best way to do this is to remove said blockages.” The answer to this theory is actually very clever, instead of doing a 180 turn ala BTX standard (and have the hot item above the PCB which while a good idea still level board in the way if you use more than 1 GPU), SilverStone has rotated the motherboard 90° so all the GPUs are edge on to any heat rising. Not satisfied to let the hot air passively rise SilverStone then went a step further and have installed large fans in the bottom of the Raven to suck cool air in and push the air up and out the top of the case. This real world application of the age old mechanics of Thermodynamics, is called by SilverStone the “Stack Effect” and is as we said ingenious use of known techniques, which are just being used in a new and exciting way.
To better understand what we mean by this here is a short Youtube video showing the stack effect in action.
While the stack effect would work even if SilverStone did not include any fans, the fans are truly what takes an idea and makes it reality. As such let’s start with the fans which accomplish this amazing task and make the magic happen.
The lone exhaust fan which helps suck the hot air from the top of this case is a 9 bladed, 120mm fan made by Xinchangfeng Electronics Co., Ltd. who are better known as Martech. In this instance it is the DF1202512RFLN model fan. Very little is known about this fan but based on experience and normal fan manufacturing nomenclature this is a Rifle bearing fan. Our standard spin and full speed test back this supposition up as it is not only a very tight fan displaying no shaft or off axis blade slop consistent with rifle bearing fans. When running at full speed we did notice a very, very slight tick-like whirring noise which we have come to associate with high end rifle bearing fans. As we said this is all supposition but it would be very surprising if we were wrong. There is a slight possibility of this fan being a sleeved bearing fan, but our experience and the 50,000 hr life expectancy says otherwise.
While the top fan is quite important, the real heart of this system is the dual 180mm fans which are specially mounted in the bottom of the motherboard area. As you can see in the above photos these fans cannot be swapped out for different fans.
The two 180mm fans are 7 bladed 180*180*32mm low speed, sleeve bearing RL4Z S1803212L-3M model fans made by GlobeFan. These fans move somewhere in the vicinity of only 55-60 CFM. We cannot be more precise than this because A)SilverStone has not released that information but B) Globe Fan's website lists a 180*180*25mm Low speed fan (RLXX S1802512L) which at 800RPM has a listed CFM of 59.42. We are inlined to believe the extra "thickness" of the SilverStone model has more to do with its unique mounting brackets than anything else and these two fans are for all intents and purposes the same.
As with the exhaust fan these two fans are very well mannered and very quiet. They do exhibit a moderate amount of shaft and off axis slop but this is par for the course with sleeve bearing fans. All in these are decent fans which produce only a minor amount of vibrations but really wish SilverStone had included either a more high performance version or at the very least alternate mounting brackets so we could easily swap them out for a more standard 120mm fans.
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