Internal Design
Although I initially questioned what I had gotten myself into, things started to make sense as I looked around. Definitely read the manual.
As with all Mini-ITX builds there is far less room to work with compared to a full or even standard ATX tower case. This can make builds for novice users quite challenging as even seasoned system builders will have to stop and think things over at certain points.
The primary challenge is getting everything inside in a neat and tidy manner. Thankfully we didn't end up having too much trouble with the RVZ01, but we will get to that shortly. For now let's just take a look at what's inside before we cram all the hardware in.
Looking front on, the right half of the case is fairly open and this is because this is where the Mini-ITX motherboard will be. In front of that is a small steel cage which is designed to house the SFX power supply along with a single 3.5" hard drive.
The RVZ01 supports just one 3.5" hard drive along with three 2.5" drives. Realistically, for a Mini-ITX gaming system a single 3.5" drive should surface as this allows for 4TB of storage. Requiring any more than that from a multi-media entertainment device and we suggest looking into a NAS server.
On the left side we have a huge complex looking plastic mold that serves several purposes, primarily housing up to a full length graphics card. This is done by mounting the GPU on its side using a PCIe riser card, the same idea used by last year's Asrock M8.
This is essentially the only way to mount a PCI Express graphics card in such a low-profile case and in this instance it works extremely well. That is because of the intelligent positive air pressure design that we spoke of earlier. Aimed directly at the GPU is a 120mm fan designed to operate at 1500 RPM at which speed it generates a whisper quiet 18dBA. There is room for a second 120mm fan as well and although this is an optional extra Silverstone did supply a third magnetic dust filter.
Directly over the motherboard area is another 120mm intake fan, the same 1500 RPM model has been used. The placement of this fan means users can get away with using a passively cooled heatsink. That said the heatsink can't be more than 68mm tall otherwise the case fan needs to be removed.
With the fan removed, heatsinks as tall as 83mm can be installed and this means Silverstone's own NT06-Pro will fit, so we swapped out the less efficient Intel box cooler.
Getting back to the massive plastic mold that holds the graphics card, it can also house a pair of 2.5" drives along with the slot-in slim optical drive. It's an elegant setup that is easy to take apart and install hardware.