CES 2009 - Cases, Coolers, and Power Supplies
by Christoph Katzer on January 14, 2009 3:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
Silverstone
Silverstone was one of the companies showing their products on the show floor, and one of the most interesting offerings is the Raven chassis. It's not actually new since the company has showed it before, but the good news is that it will be available very soon. The concept is very nice and definitely something new to the market. Silverstone turned the whole motherboard 90° to the front and now the side with the I/O ports actually faces up.
The chassis comes in a futuristic design that isn't really to our taste but there will almost certainly be people that love it. The front door slides down to provide access to the optical devices. All of the switches and USB ports are on the top, so if you have this chassis standing on the floor beside you there will be no problem reaching them. If you look at the back the appearance is kind of odd, since there are no graphics cards jacks anymore, no USB ports, and so on. Only the power supply sits in the same old position at the bottom of the case.
When you look inside, things really look different. The positive to this layout is you will not need very long cables on the power supply anymore even with a bottom-mounted PSU. Cables with a length of up to 40cm will be sufficient for PCI-E and the ATX main connectors. The hard drives sit on the right side, lined up vertically. There are definitely positive aspects of this concept, but there are negatives as well. Silverstone has a cover for the top connectors (i.e. the monitor and other devices) but it still looks rather odd. We will withhold any final judgment until we can test the chassis in a real-world setup.
We haven't seen many new products in the power supply and chassis field from Silverstone, but did show some cool FT01 cases with nice paintjobs.
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JonnyDough - Thursday, January 15, 2009 - link
What's the name on that new GPU cooler by Zalman? Looks really nice. I think I'll get it for my 8800GTS if it fits it. Do you know if the memory heatsinks come with it? They're nice and spikey.Evinyatar - Thursday, January 15, 2009 - link
That's the VF2000. Looks like a nice CPU cooler for low profile HTPC's.JonnyDough - Sunday, January 18, 2009 - link
Aye. I hope it fits 939 and 478 though. I wish there were more good universal heatsinks.JonnyDough - Thursday, January 15, 2009 - link
It's good to see Thermaltake filling the wattage ranges of PSUs. We need 350w PSUs too!JonnyDough - Thursday, January 15, 2009 - link
Is that a new SilentFlux cooler I see in the Silverstone Raven case? Silent Flux coolers are made by Noiselimit (Noiselimit.com). I haven't seen that particular one before. I'm curious to know more about it if you have any info on it. Thanks.~Ry
Christoph Katzer - Thursday, January 15, 2009 - link
They came with sll of the i7 systems for the show...JonnyDough - Thursday, January 15, 2009 - link
I noticed too in SilverStone's silver HTPC case that they have another Noise Limit bubble pump cooler. Any particular reason they're using those in their displays this year?JeBarr - Thursday, January 15, 2009 - link
I can think of a few good reasons to flip the motherboard 90 degrees to the front, but if they only did this to accomodate 18" graphics cards from the future then what a waste. I did like the ABS black pearl that has the mobo mounted on left side instead of right, if viewed from the front of case. I did like that design except that the mobo mounted too high-up in the chassis, which prevented the 4th hd4850 with aftermarket cooler from fitting in so that project was scrapped. Just might be a new option now with this Raven, but if it is gonna retail for more the the lian-li pc80 then forget it.yehuda - Wednesday, January 14, 2009 - link
It's nice to see Antec update this model. I can see they've added audio ports on the front and expanded the side grille. Still, no Firewire, eSATA or a card reader. Any idea what has changed on the inside?Anubis - Wednesday, January 14, 2009 - link
Ugly ColorsPointless doors
Useless bright lights
:(