SilverStone Raven RV04 - A Flight of Fancy?
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Page 4 of 5 - Interior Design (Part II)
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Interior Design (Part II)
Interior Design (Part II)
To kick off our installation process, we started by examining the 3.5-inch drive enclosure that we had removed earlier. It has foam padding but it doesn't have any rail guides for the 3.5-inch drive. So get ready to bring out your screwdriver should you install drives here. There are also no drive adapters that will allow us to mount 2.5-inch drives. Besides this enclosure, there are two other bottom-mounted 3.5-inch drive enclosures; however, each can only accommodate a single 3.5-inch drive. One of them even has a CPU cooler support arm that is adjustable.
Next, we take a closer look at the drive enclosure with the CPU cooler support arm. The drive enclosure is secured to the bottom of the chassis with four screws. The CPU cooler support arm is fairly adjustable as its fastening screws require the use of a screwdriver. The installation of our 3.5-inch drive was hassle-free; we pushed a front plastic stopper out of the way before sliding the drive into the enclosure.
According to the manual, these two bottom-mounted 3.5-inch drive enclosures support hot-swappable drives; however, the CP05 or CP05-SAS will be required as additional purchases in order to enjoy this feature. To support this feature, the drive bay has a woven strap that allows the drive to be released quickly, after the plastic stop has been unlocked.
After removing the two 3.5-inch drive enclosures, we installed our 2.5-inch drive at the bottom of the chassis. This area supports up to four such drives. We are surprised by the lack of foam cushions at their mounting options, as well as 3.5-inch drive adapters. The latter should have been supplied in the event we decide to mount our 2.5-inch drives into any of the seven 3.5-inch drive options. After all, SSD drives are getting popular in enthusiast DIY systems.
After the 2.5-inch drive's installation, we proceeded to put back all the 3.5-inch drive enclosures and carried on with the installation of the rest of our test components. One pleasant surprise was due to the company's attention to details. There are allowance holes near the expansion slot covers, which enable us to use our long screwdriver to secure our graphics card. Usually, we would have to opt for a shortscrew driver in order to secure the screws from the interior of the chassis; however, with these allowance holes, the length of our screw driver didn't matter.
As expected, the hardest part during installation was the connection of the power and data cables for our 2.5-inch drive. It involved a fair deal of squeezing before we could attach both cables to the drive. This is because of the narrow space between the two 3.5-inch drive enclosures, as well as the cut-out of the enclosure that allowed us to connect the cables. This could have been avoided if there were adapters for 2.5-inch drive that would have allowed us to install our drive into any of 3.5-inch drive enclosures. Alternatively, pre-prepare your cable routing prior to mounting the 3.5-inch drive cage over these 2.5-inch drives.
From the other side of the chassis, we bear witness to the effectiveness of the cut-outs of the motherboard tray for cable management.
There is also a bundled "VGA supporter holder"; it functions as a buttress support for your high-end graphics card that tends to be heavy. It will help to prevent your motherboard from warping due to the weight of the card.
There are a total of three bundled VGA support claws, enough for a 4-way graphics cards configuration. The claw is screwed onto the support holder while the graphics card will rest on the horizontal portion of the claw.
After installing the VGA support holder, we installed the side panel and the support holder didn't pose any obstructions.
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