Raven 2 or Haf X?

I heavily dislike the Raven 2 and FT02 for many reasons, most of which are related to issues I can see with the RV01...
- Hot-swap drives are sort of a weird orientation on the FT02. I own a RV01 and I really can't imagine myself hot-swapping with ease on the RV01. I mean, the Hailstorm got it right, it should be an easy, user accessible bay without having to partially dismantle the case.
- Top mesh is oddly designed for a case where airflow is supposed to be coming out the top. Same problem with the RV01. IMO, SS made it a bit too flashy and not enough practicality...As in, part of the plastic housing that the mesh is strapped to is easily obstructing some of the airflow, primarily the CPU exhaust's airflow. Odd, since the AP121 fans that the new RV02's come with seem that they would function best with an unobstructed vent.
- PSU mount has me extremely uneasy. I would never want to strap my PSU up there, I'd rather have it sitting on the floor where it belongs, like on the RV01, lol.
- The side window is on the right. What?
- The size proportion is completely out of whack compared to the Raven 1's full tower form factor. Thing sticks out at the rear, without a lot of height to balance it out, meh.

Though, I'm seeing a lot of promise in silverstone's presentation of the RV03 at Computex...that case has it all right. No long chassis, heck, it's a significantly smaller than the RV01 now. The PSU is mounted on the bottom where it belongs, and actually in the front of the PC. HDDs are mounted behind the mobo tray, SS just ditched hot-swapping. So now you have 7 absolutely free to use 5.25" bays. And it's supposedly able to jam in an E-ATX motherboard, despite how much more compact the case got. I dunno, I'm considering just swapping to a RV03 when it comes out instead of spending more dough on optimizing case airflow. That thing looks pretty sick with airflow.

IMO, I personally favor the HAF series in this case. Long standing reputation here, and you can just chock up the thing with pretty much any fan configuration you can think of.  Don't be too happy about the HAF X's USB 3.0 ports. I mean, they're still not really true ports, they're just using your motherboard's USB 3.0 ports as a host, so you don't gain any more usb 3.0 ports. If you have the ports anyways, why not just jack them in there?

To sum it up in my opinion
Raven 2
- Doesn't fix some of the issues with practical features that the RV01 had...
- Side window on right?
- Hanging psu gives me the heebie jeebies.
- Personal opinion, but the form factor is meh.
- Has less fan modularity, but SS seems to be doing well with their general fan efficiency.
- Should be pretty quiet if you treat it well.

HAF X
- HAF series has a good reputation.
- Takes pretty much any fan configuration you want, or can be modded in some way to do so.
- Looks great.
- Front USB 3.0 ports, in essence, are really just a well placed internal extension cords.


Edited by ablahblah - 15 Nov 2010 at 6:02pm