When the Raven 3 came in, I was a little surprised that they went with the brown box look. Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with keeping it simple and keeping the costs down but with such a high profile case we normally see full color designs on the packaging. With the monotone design Silverstone put an outline drawing of the Raven 3 on the front of the box with the word Raven looking from a horror film and an extremely large number 3 as well. Around on the back side we had two more outline drawings but this time around they are of both sides of the inside of the case. Along with that we have red used on the otherwise monotone design to draw your attention to each of the cases features. Each red dot has a line that leads to a short explanation of each feature.
Inside the case we have the standard styrofoam on each side of the case keeping it secure and a plastic bag around the case to keep it nice and clean. I will point out that our case did come in with a slight tweak to it that I’m assuming happened in shipping so the styrofoam wasn’t really enough to prevent damage completely, going with the softer plastic foam might have absorbed this though.
With the case out we almost missed the box tucked into the side. Inside the box we got the RV03 (Raven 3) user manual, zip ties, all of the screws needed, and two adapter cables as well. The Molex to two fan cable is nice, but the USB 3.0 to USB 2.0 adapter really caught my eye. I love that they give everyone who might not have a USB 3.0 header on their motherboard a way to keep the USB 3.0 ports on the front panel active.
I had the Raven 3 for about six months. Very nice case and easy to build in with a ton of built in cable management.
What I didn't like with the 3 is that:
1) The Raven 2 had an extra fan on the bottom of the chassis
2) No consideration for mounting of consumer grade liquid coolers (Corsair H70, for example) I had to mount one in push&pull and vent it out the top. It looked a little weird.
3) The front panel USB were USB 3.0 A connectors that piggybacked off of I/O USB 3.0 and not a header connector.
4) The position of the power plug was kind of asinine.
From what I was told by someone I used to work with who attended Computex last y ear is that the issues I had with the Raven 3 were fixed in the Raven 4, just keep in mind that I am waaaaaaaaaay pickier than the person who told me this.
Over-all Silverstone cases, IMO, are the best there is. The Fortress and Raven series are just massive and awesome. The problem of course is they're massive. Probably why we don't see many at LAN parties!
evildoer wrote: 1) The Raven 2 had an extra fan on the bottom of the chassis
yeah this bothered me a little, but then I went back to what I wrote about the Raven 2 when I reviewed it. The way they had the hard drives orientated blocked the flow of air from that third fan anyhow.