Takaharu

I decided that as I recently got a Raven RV02 I'd share my experience with you, as it's been so highly recommended.
The box is freaking huge. There is not really another way to describe it; it's freaking huge. Lots of padding, perhaps? Nope, I opened it up, tipped it upside down to get the contents out and it must've been 3" shorter than the box. Did I mention that it was freaking huge? There was a bits box as well but that was indented in the polystyrene so that didn't actually add to the size...
I popped off the top, all eager-like and unscrewed the front side panel which, was, actually, on the other side. Never mind, it doesn't affect the situation of the PC anyway. I took my time looking over it, assessing how I'd try and put everything in and wondering how I was going to put 4 hard drives in a 3 hard drive caddy. The adapters, I could use an adapter! Problem solved. Little did I know that I'd have more to face.
I disconnected my PC and popped open both sides of the case and took off the front (Coolermaster Mystique by the way) and gaped in horror as I'd actually had to take everything out.
I dreaded doing anything major to my PC - the cables were a git to get situated the way I had them and I could never be bothered to take the motherboard the whole way out to do anything with it. You should've seen it when I replaced the CPU fan... Don't get me started on the SATA cables - the ports were about 1" away from the case because some bright spark in ASUS decided that it was a great idea to put the SATA ports facing the side of the case where you'd have the least room.
Right, onto disassembly. I popped out all of the hard drivers. They were the easiest to do so they came first. The graphics card, sound card and wireless card were next (I'm still not sure why I still have a wireless card but it may still come in handy - I used to be in range of a wireless router then we moved it into another room).
I breathed in deeply - "I will be brave" - (breathed out) then began work on disconnecting all of the power cables and LCD from the motherboard. Without stopping to think of how PO'ed I would be if I had to re-do it all, I unscrewed the motherboard, popped off the front panel, lifted the motherboard out of the case, realised I still had the SATA cables all plugged in then took those out too. Crap, hadn't actually thought this far ahead - the case isn't actually ready to have the motherboard screwed in yet. Luckily, I have a wooden floor so I put the motherboard upside down on the floor (the other components were on the floor anyway as you wouldn't stand a chance in hell of getting anything on my desk). I disconnected all of the modular cables that I could then took the PSU out. My case hadn't looked so bare in ages.
I screwed in the motherboard, got to the fourth screw then realised that there were less risers than I had initially believed. So, be wary of this as Silverstone has only fitted half of the screws! I then proceeded to fit the sound card. However, when I lined up the soundcard to the screw hole it didn’t reach the PCI-E slot. Come on guys, rather than creating a case that works for the majority, make an RV02 that’s specifically designed for the ASUS Maximus Formula so that I don’t have to bend the bracket slightly to get the sound card able to plug into the motherboard as well as screw it in. I had fun trying to get it to fit in though because a couple of times I came close without bending the bracket, the wireless card popped out. Eventually I got them both screwed in, along with the graphics card. The graphics card didn’t line up with the case but that’s because the bracket was too far away from the screw hole. After a bit of jiggering about I managed to get the bottom part of the bracket screwed in. That was all mildly annoying.
I looked down at the SATA ports on the motherboard after I had fitted it and thought “freaking heck, there’s room!” – there was actually room for me to plug SATA cables into the motherboard without having to struggle with it for half an hour. That was most impressive.
The power supply was next, which was pretty easy to fit. I screwed it into the case (only three of the four holes were visible, though?) and stood the case upright – it was ready to have the other parts plugged in. Note that the power supply holes are designed to make PSUs fully-reversible so that you can face downwards-pointing fans to the rear of the case. I got the hard drives ready, looked at the caddy and I realised – “how the heck am I supposed to get the hard drives in and out of there without removing the motherboard again?” Getting the hard drives into the caddy was going to be the easy part, getting them screwed in would not be so easy. So, I started inserting them into the case. After the first one went in it dawned on me; I had read on one of the reviews online that you could remove the front plates of the case to gain access to the hard drive caddy. Out they came, one by one and the metal brackets that came with it. People that have said there is no sharp metal in the case didn’t take into consideration that the metal that you have to remove for the front of the case does become sharp if when you snap it off! I didn’t scratch myself but it’s something that these reviewers need to take into consideration; someone could get a minor injury from something like that.
I got the caddy out of the case after losing one of the thumb screws to the deep oblivion that is the bottom of the case (do you know how hard it is to get a screw out of the bottom of the case once it’s fallen in? With most cases it’s easy but this case has three dirty great huge fans in the way) and screwed in the hard drives. It was quite odd screwing in hard drives because the last two cases I had used screw-less hard drive clips. Thinking about it, though, the RV02 uses rubber, which may benefit the vibrations of the hard drive whilst it’s in use but I’m not sure; I would’ve assumed that a hard drive that doesn’t move at all would be more beneficial. They went in and I placed them back slightly for that extra little bit of room. There was only about huge gap between the hard drives and the graphics card so I thought it could benefit from a few more millimetres.
The other hard drive on its tod was next in line; I attached the adapter (after looking up to see which parts they were) to the hard drive - more screws - and slid that in from the front just above the other hard drives after removing another front panel. That screwed in to the case (I'm seeing a lot of screws here) quite happily. I suddenly realised; the SATA power cables I have only have three points per cable - three for the hard drives, three would be for the two optical drives plus the other hard drive and there wasn't enough slack between each point to plug in the other hard drive from where I put it. Bugger. Off came the next front panel and the hard drive swapped places, after losing one of the screws to the oblivion that was the bottom of the case.
The two optical drives had to go in next. That was pretty easy; pop off the front panels, slide them in, use the SCREW-LESS clips and that was it. It was so good this paragraph was only two lines.
At the very top went the card reader/fan controller. Little did I know the fun was yet to begin. After much, much fiddling I got the three thermometers, three fan controlling cables, power cable and data cable stuck down the back of the case: data cable plugged into the "front" USB port on the motherboard, one thermometer & fan controlling cable to each bottom fan and the power cable leading down at the back of the case. These all hid rather well thanks to the conveniently-positioned malleable parts at the back of the case; one bent bit of metal and all of the cables are hidden. These were later tidied up away from the holes using the re-usable cable ties with the strategically-positioned tie slot things.
The SATA cables all plugged in quite effortlessly thanks to the gaping huge space between the motherboard and fans, all tucked nicely down the back of the case and most of the power cables went in through the back hole, round the back and into their corresponding components. Not the drive cables though, they were all too short to go round the back of the case and had to go along the bottom instead. It was surprising as the cables don't look short.
To cut a long story short (wait, what?), the case was ready at this point; everything was plugged in and ready to go. I fired it up... to not a lot. After some trial-and-error I found it was my DVD-ROM drive at fault and that stayed unplugged (probably a faulty SATA cable - haven't tried getting it working as yet) and after a lot of buggering about, unplugging and plugging in, unscrewing and re-screwing I decided to omit the fan controlling aspect of the memory card reader - it didn't work properly with the fans (kept saying that the fan speed was flickering between around 450 RPM and 780-800RPM, even though my motherboard reported stable speeds around 1000RPM) and the alarm was bugging the heck out of me, even though it was set to alarm at the lowest setting, 500RPM.
It took me practically the whole evening to get my PC back up and running because I also had to keep assisting my mum with her Windows 7 install. Add that to the cable tidying it took a good few hours.
I am pleased with the case; it gives lots of room, I can push it a lot closer to my wall and everything's conveniently at the top of the case, pretty level with my chair (the case is under my desk on the floor). However, the light is a lot brighter than people say and there is no visible hard drive activity LED, even though there's a cable for it.

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SeraphicSorcerer

So, how many times did you cut your hands doing this?

Grats on your new case

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Bolletje

You have any pictures from the case w/ hardware installed?

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It has come to my attention from sources apart from yourself, that you enjoy the water pokemon mudkip in some manner or form.

Takaharu

Seraph - none, I wasn't being serious about the whole cutting part.
Belletje - soon. I've yet to re-install the motherboard's LCD and hide its cable. When I do that I'll probably take a pic or two.

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DJ BIG T

grats man!!! thats a nice case you got..

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Zardon

Health to enjoy it - it might be some time before I find a chassis better than this on the market. still my No1 choice.

Bolletje

Oo, ok.

There aren't really shops here that sell the case (I can only find one), but the price isn't that high (130 euro).

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It has come to my attention from sources apart from yourself, that you enjoy the water pokemon mudkip in some manner or form.

Chaos

mine should be here Nov 6th, it has to come from California so it has a coast to coast journey ahead before it gets here

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Zardon

when you get the system built chaos post some pics and your views on the positives and any negatives. im always interested to hear the views of experienced users on these products.

Chaos

will do Z, I am relying on your experience and views on this purchase

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Takaharu

Mine was free

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dctokyo

Sorry to say, but the case does have a Red hard drive activity LED in the middle of the big blue LED. How do I know, I have this case.

Takaharu

Yeah, I found that later. It's not very visible in the blue but, because I found the blue light too bright anyway, I unplugged its power so now I have a more visible HDD LED.

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Zardon

so are you guys impressed with the RV02?

Takaharu

It's roomy, it has loads of cooling, it's huge but can be pushed back against a wall, it was free... yeah, I like it. Could've done with more screwless features but meh.

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dctokyo

I have my case blue light plugged into my fan controller, this way I can turn down the brightness.

dctokyo

Hands down the best case that I have owned. Very roomy, great cable management and my temps are low, and I came from another great case the Silverstone FT01.

Plus, it is one of the best matches for the Corsair CWCH50-1, I am able to run it with 2 fans on a push/pull and my E8600 overclocked to 4.0 runs 28 to 30 at this time and gaming it never gets over 34C.

My NB temps went from 52 to 46, as the middle fan blows up and across it now

Chaos

so far I am very happy, it took some getting used to the layout concept but it works great. It is very roomy and even on high the fans are very quiet.

Update: I just added 2 shots of the finished product

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