SILVERSTONE Black Aluminum / Steel Grandia Series SST-GD07B ATX Media Center / HTPC Case

Pros: Most likely HTPC case to accommodate your hard core gear. Smooth look with front panel closed. Plenty of cooling.

Cons: Not designed to support water cooling* (more below). A bit tall, check dimensions of your shelves.

Overall Review: After deliberation this case gets the full five stars for being best in class for an HTPC that can house serious equipment. This comes with significant caveats though. On the plus side it fit a Sapphire Radeon 7970 OC, power cables and all. The drive cage shroud drops down neatly over this 11.5" card with power cables coming out of the top and leaves a bit of room to spare above and plenty of room to the front. Awesome. I replaced another Silverstone case with this one. That was the biggest HTPC case available at the time (2008) and the only way I could get a 10.5" card into it was to perform surgery with a Dremel tool and a metal cutting blade. The case looks great with the panel closed. Not so great with it open. The little locking mechanism works fine. Wouldn't stop a thief, but it should keep kiddies and puppies out. There is room to install 4x120mm fans, 2 on the sides and 2 on the bottom as well as 2x80mm fans at the back. It looks like you can install 3x120mm fans in front but one space is actually blocked by the drive cage. If you have a weird configuration you can replace the 120mm fans with 80mm ones. Sadly I could not through any Tetris zen induced mysticism get a Corsair H60 water cooling radiator/fan installed inside this case with an Asus ROG Hero mobo installed. The fan could be mounted but the radiator would interfere with either the mobo or the cables or the drive cage. This is pretty much the smallest water cooler available so don't expect to get hydro easy. For my part I got out some tools and partially removed one of the grill grates on the side then ground the edges smooth. I routed the water lines outside of the case through this new aperture and mounted the 120mm fan/radiator for the water cooling block externally. Good night warranty. The radiator is on the fan which is on the case and points in drawing air over the radiator and into the case. Maybe a little counter-intuitive as this is warming the intake air, but the cpu reads 33C in the BIOS at idle which is sweet and chilly. The kit's manual actually recommends mounting the fan as an intake anyway so no worries. There is room to drop in a bunch of drives. I went with 3 (2.5" hdd, 3.5" hdd, dvd 5.25"). Simple no trouble to install these. The 5.25" drive in the horizontal mount is only held in place by the plastic bracket. Feels a mite flaky. Doesn't move when spinning, but a little hand pressure can displace it easily. Need to double check that I didn't miss a securing mechanism but I don't think so. The vertical 5.25" drive slots can be screw secured, but vertical drives bite. You inevitably drop your precious, precious media to it's scratchy doom. Front panel cable routing is done for you very neatly. Replaced all 120mm fans with high grade silenced ones and the build is dead quiet. It's lighter than expected. Rtm! A long tricky build with sweet results on a glorious large screen tv. Screwdriver needed.

Pros: Awesome construction Holds a lot of hard drives and the whole cage is removable. Great air flow from bottom and side 120mm fans. Nice front panel which covers all ports and BD drives.

Cons: None really! To name a few annoyances; Noisy 1200 rpm fans ( I replaced with pwm OCZ fans). Vertical drive slots ( I will use them for future HD expansion) Ugly key hole in the front ( I wish it was on the side). No fan shields inside to protect cables from hitting;

Overall Review: I used core i7 3770 with CPU cooler SilverStone Argon Series AR02 which is super easy to install and I hear no noise 2 feet away. Motherboard P8Z68-V PRO/GEN3 with samsung SSD 830 and four 3 TB hard drives; OCZ 600W modular PSU

Pros: With minor modification, this can fit 10x 3.5" drives plus a few more SSDs. I'm using an ATX motherboard, with SAS RAID controller, video tuner/capture board and full length dual-slot graphics card, and 240mm radiator(mounted externally). I also added extra slot fans for the SAS controller and video tuner. It's all a bit noisy under load, so I run this in a closet.

Cons: Steel sheetmetal is thin and the case flexes even when not fully loaded. For hometheater application, thicker gauge metal can cut down on vibration and resonance, especially important when multiple hard drives are used. The 5.25" half-height bays are obsolete and would be better used for additional 3.5" bays(which I modified as), or slimline 5.25"(Silverstone sells an adapter).

Overall Review: a bit expensive for a traditional horizontal "desktop" layout, with black cosmetics for "home theater" use.

Pros: Well thought out . Built to last . Holds eatx+ m/b (see cons). Has all parts and screws that you'll ever need . Accepts big video card (as long as you don't need all 4 h/d (3 1/2") slots . Will accommodate a larger CPU cooler . No hard drive vibration detected with 4 7200 rpm hard drives installed and running (solid cage and attachment arrangement) . Good cooling with extra fan slots and multiple sizing . Power switch can be locked with faceplate along with muted power on LED brightness (blue , so not annoying)

Cons: My m/b (990fxa ud7) has the 90° data connectors on back side of board. With the full size fans installed , cannot use them . Have to use smaller fans . Another 1/4"-3/8" would've made a big difference . But how many put such a large board in htpc ? Once you install CD/DVD drive(s) , the drive cage gets tricky (and heavy) to line up and install (no problem at all if this is first step , but a hard drive will fail eventually , and to remove , cage has to come out .. unless you only screw one side)

Overall Review: I put ALOT of components in this case . 4 h/d , DVD , fan controller, 5 1/4" backplane cage (holding 4 ssd) , eatx m/b , sea sonic x-series p/s , 8 1/2" long video card, raid card and 7 cooling fans (did not use those supplied , arctic fans only...very quiet) . The airflow keeps it all cool . I left the inside 5 1/4" vertical drive slot open for some of the extra cabling (in a good spot to tuck the excess) . I am glad I did not need the slot...though it seems a cavernous case at first , it fills up quickly . Planning and patience is required if you want to fully utilize the case options .

Pros: This case is amazing for the price. Silverstone never lets me down with their quality cases. I built out a home server with this build. The best part that I like about this case is that after I'm done using this for my VM machines and networking studies it came be moved from my office rack into my living room and look great with my Yamaha RX-673 receiver. It's already acting as my music / DLNA server that streams to the receiver. Anybody in the house can also access the HDD's as a simple home NAS solution too. Air flow is great. I only added 2 x 80's fan in the back to create the push & pull air flow through the case.

Cons: The ONLY con I can think of, is that if you get a large PSU AND add on the hot-swappable 3.5 bays, there is no room to mount a fan on the back of the Silverstone FP57B's. Like I said, that is really reaching for a con and most people will just mount the HDD's inside the case (plenty of room, believe there are 7 slots for HDD's and 2 internal slots for SSD's. I just wanted to have the option of having hot-swappable HDD's for the future in case I needed it.

Overall Review: Home DNLA Server/ VMWare Workstation 9.0 Intel Core i7-3770 Ivy Bridge Intel BOXDQ77MK LGA 1155 motherboard CORSAIR Vengeance 32GB (4 x 8GB) Sivlerstone SST-GD07B HTPC case Silverstone RA02 Rackmount Ear Kit 2 x SilverStone FP57B (Hot Swap 3.5 HHD bays) 2 x ENERMAX UC-8EB (80mm Case Fans) ASUS 24X DVD Burner ASUS ENGT430 GeForce GT 430 CORSAIR HX Series HX750 PSU Crucial 64G SSD (Windows 7 Pro)

Pros: Can hold a lot of drives for HTPC case. Isn't that heavy. Looks nice and has great airflow. Nice locking pull down front door.

Cons: Power supply should have been mounted on other side of mother board (you can see how it is now in pics). You will have to plug in your SATA cables to your mobo BEFORE you put in the drive cage, but that does depend on SATA port location on mobo

Overall Review: The cons are definitely do not outweigh the pros, though they seem like more. They are generally small issues that are a pain but can be worked around. All in all, this case houses a PC very nicely right in an entertainment center and helps the clutter.

Pros: The manual was great in describing the best order of installation, and provided detailed specifications on limitations of installed component sizes. (The limitations are in the back of the manual, read that before purchasing this case).

Cons: Installing four hard drives in the middle 'cavity' was easy. Installing the SSD and another hard drive in the recommended locations was not. Perhaps with different SATA cables it might work. Instead I added adapters that expanded the size of the extra hard drive to an optical drive size, and expanded (in two steps) the SSD as well. Then I was able to install both in the area normally reserved for optical drives.

Overall Review: Kind of surprising that it is designed to hold four optical drives, although I turned that to my advantage (see cons). Locking front panel blocks use of optical drive, not much use for me. As with other HTPC cases (this is my third), compromises are made to keep the size of the case small.

Pros: Beautiful anodized brushed aluminum face plate. Nice workmanship throughout. Plenty of room for full-sized MOBO and long-ish GPU. Plenty of mounting points for fans - although they could have arranged them better.

Cons: Loss of egg for seemingly unnecessary two-handled steel insert that drops into case from above to hold optical drives behind the keyed flip-down face plate. Optical drives must be mounted so far forward (to make flush) that you cannot remove the same two-handled insert once the drives are secured. Otherwise, third fan mounting spot on case bottom is blocked by same steel insert once installed - taped closed the perforated bottom in this area. Feels a little pricey at $125. Finally, the little removable "vent" (that has no purpose) above the row of peripheral blanks that you remove for rail-mounted cards might interfere with some GPUs - I have a MSI TwinFrozr. Was running four fans into the case so I just left it out - the positive case pressure would cause that opening to become an exhaust port anyway.

Overall Review: I built this to hang under a desk for aesthetic reasons. It won't look good next to a McIntosh but otherwise I would use this case for a home theater build. A little pricey (could've saved $10 dropping the two-handled steel insert) but then we'll always ask for more value. None of the little issues were deal-breakers but required time to resolve each. Would buy again.