today we've got something pretty cool to take a look at this is the silverstone
grandia series gd08 this is according to
silverstone an amazing home theater server case with incredible storage and
cooling capacity that pretty much sums it up so basically in a similar form
factor to their previous home theater cases and you know similar form factor
as well as similar style meaning you've got a nice thick aluminum front bezel
you've got the slick elegant looks
they have managed to cram and you know cram is such an inelegant
word to describe this product which isn't really fair but to cram
and up to 12 hard drives
and compatibility for an ssi that is
like uber eatx motherboard
and and long expansion slots meaning you can install
any graphics card pretty much as many hard drives as you want and pretty much
any motherboard you want in what is basically not much bigger than a regular
hd pc case so i'm very excited to take a look at this they've actually got a
warning right here this is a unique product please read the included manual
before proceeding with installation so i'm guessing they had to make some sort
of weird arrangements with the internals in order to make all of that stuff fit
with uh with pretty much yeah zero compromises configuration
capability without uh without overdoing
the size you know i mean it's one thing to design the cosmos ii which can fit
pretty much anything but it's the size of you know
you know a plane um whereas this is you know i guess a
little bit more more thoughtful not to you know rag on
the cosmos too because it definitely has its place uh we see we've got hard
packing foam usually i prefer to see the softer foams just because they tend to
take a bit more of a beating before they yield however this one apparently
arrived without any difficulty it helps that silverstone actually uses a higher
quality outside carton box than most case manufacturers do
here i'll show you guys you can see they use a uh a double wall here and then
they this um this actually improves puncture
resistance just the finish that they use on the outside as well so
it's it's less of a concern for me with a silverstone box than it would be with
someone else gto8 yeah this is really not that big
compared to something like an lc17 or you know like one of their one of their
staple products that doesn't have this enormous compatibility
um sorry about that guys battery died you know the drill so let's start with
the outside of the case because you know silverstone is certainly well known for
elegant beautiful cases and this is definitely no extension
extension it is an extension of that principle and it is no exception so you
can see here we've got just a gorgeous brushed aluminum front now brushed
aluminum is a bit of a double-edged sword for me because i'm always afraid to touch it because it tends to get
gunked up if you get your fingerprints all over it but as long as you put it
somewhere where it's going to be relatively safe it'll look beautiful for years to come we've got our power and
reset switches as well as our as well as an led indicator on the front
we've got two five and a quarter inch bays so you can put up to a couple
different drives in here if you want two usb 3.0 ports as well as front
headphones and microphone if you were going to use this as like a desktop
tower on your case and it looks just wonderful i love the finish that they
put on their cases on the side we've got two 120 millimeter
cooling fan slots including as you can see right here
there uh sorry push
really push
give me a sec there we go never mind i got it okay yes you push it
and then you take it off so including an easily removable
uh fan filter that has and this is something they explained to me at ces
this year this is apparently the most
optimal baffle to place in front of a fan
in order to have as little impact as possible on airflow while reducing the
audible noise of the fan so there you go you can see silverstone spent
the guys i was talking to were like yeah we spent a really really long time on
this trying absolutely everything so there you go that is the result of
months of engineering that baffle which apparently will make your fans perform
better and be less noisy so here you can
see the 120 millimeter cooling fan slots i'm just gonna go ahead and put this
back on now you can actually screw it into place if you want so you can see
there's a couple screw holes there or you can just leave it
slideable just like that let's move around to the other side
where we find oh sorry it's not super heavy i was just kind of
kind of awkward so where we have another 120 millimeter fan so this one you pull
off including the same baffle uh doesn't include the fans by default but
i mean most people who are going to be buying high super high end
cases in my experience are usually finding their own fans that they prefer
as well so there's not much benefit to including
basic fans with uh with a case like this
here we've got three 120 millimeter fans
now this is also compatible with 100 1 120 380s or six 60 millimeter fans
should you so desire so i'm going to go ahead and pull these off yeah these just
snap off so you can see the wide variety of mounting holes that are there on the
bottom of the case so you can see we have two fans installed out of the factory
giving you overall positive air pressure inside the case this is one of the
key concepts that silverstone has really been working on over the last couple years
actually and that is positive airflow so positive or positive air pressure rather
so positive air for air pressure keeps
the keeps it doesn't keep dust from accumulating
inside your case but it reduces the amount of dust that can get into your case because if you have negative air
pressure that is to say more exhaust fans than intake fans what happens is
dust will tend to get sucked in places where there aren't fans whereas if you
have more intake than exhaust it'll tend to have just a you know a passive little
bit of airflow out of all those little gaps in the corners of the case which
can keep dust from being sucked into them as long as your intakes are filtered
that is on the fans that you're using for intake otherwise it's not helpful at
all okay so on the back we've got seven plus one configuration for pci slots you
can use that for a fan controller or whatever else but it means we can't
support xlatx motherboards in spite of the wide motherboard compatibility we've
got our standard sort of bottom mounted power supply okay
and then i o as well as two 80 millimeter fan slots now let's go ahead
and open it up and i am very very curious to see the inside of this
especially so that i can know what merits that special warning about uh
making sure you read the manual before trying to build a system in this case because it must be
it must be pretty complicated though i mean you know it's probably not
complicated but it might be a little bit tricky like you know you'll go ahead and
you'll install all your hard drives to find out that if you install the hard drives first you can't install your
motherboard or something like that got a couple vibration dampeners here so
those guys press down on the
handles when you're holding up to 12 hard drives
at a time you do need handles even when we did our little build in the array r2
with the Windows home server six hard drives and one go is precarious you want
to make sure that you're holding it very securely because if you drop them
i mean even if they're not dead even if they still work you can never trust them
with your data again anyway
so those little pads hold these down in place so that they don't cause any
vibration you can also see there's anti-vibration padding here as well just
to keep the hard drive cage here from transferring vibrations to the top panel
other than that the case is pretty much one solid piece so yeah if you want to
fit anything wider than standard atx in here it looks like you're going to have
to play some funny games with removing these fans
in order to get the extra space for the motherboard it looks like this whole
mounting system thing for it actually
comes out so hold on a second let's uh give me a minute with the manual
actually i'll just i'll be able to tell you guys more about this
let me start by saying that this case is probably the one of the most confusing
ones i've encountered but it also has the best manual i have ever encountered
so in spite of it being a black and white manual and look how thick it is
this manual is like head and shoulders better than any other case i've ever
encountered so it tells you there's an installation guide and the installation
guide isn't just like how to put in a pci express graphics card no no the
installation guide is step by step one by one what order to install the
components in to make sure that everything will fit gives you little tips and tricks about make sure that
there's nothing interfering with this particular spot right here while you're
putting in this thing so it shows you all the installation guidy stuff it
explains how to use things like these
whoops these which are used to mount a hard drive in this little tiny gap over
here but more on that later um it also it gives you recommendations for
a bunch of different components so they explain oh okay well if you're going to
use a dual here how many case manufacturers bother to tell this tell
you this if you're going to use a dual CPU motherboard use one
with the CPU socket in the top right corner because that will give you better
compatibility with this case that kind of tip is fantastic to have as an end
user and most manufacturers don't really bother to tell you stuff like that they
expect you to figure it out on your own but it's in here
very very cool they also tell you you know if you want to put a high-end
graphics card here you're going to have to not install hard drives here here and
here and you know just component size limitations they have a whole big swac
of stuff about this make sure you use this kind of right angle cable as opposed to this kind of right angle
cable fan configurations what can fit
according to what kind of a motherboard you're using
say six by 60 mil fans is for the ssi configuration
all right recommended coolers graphics cards what direction the airflow should
go in in order to be optimized for your case this is this is just like great
stuff okay so let's move on and let's actually look at the case itself so you
can pull this out with the two handles and it'll be heavier when there are
drives in it but i want to first explain where all the drives go so
here you can put three three and a quarter three and a half inch drives
these won't interfere with anything they're just across from the power
supply so no matter what kind of graphics cards you have or whatever other hoo-ha that will be just fine you
can then put another up to four here depending on the orientation you can
turn them either this way or this way as long as you don't have a super long
graphics card installed and if this is for like media storage then that's
probably the kind of configuration you go with you can then and this is awesome
put a an eighth three and a half inch drive like over here so you actually run
the SATA connect cables through here so the drive sits like
uh like this i believe
uh nope like this sorry guys it's really tricky so it sits
like this so you can just barely access them and run the cables to it and so
that's eight three and a half inch drives you can put two two and a half
inch drives oh yeah and it uses this adapter over there so that bolts to the
side of the case which then screws into the drive meaning it's not sticking
right up against the case with a risk of shorting out so we've got two two and a
half inch drive bays here and you run
the cables to those up here as well
and then finally the two five and a quarter inch bays which you can also use
to install more three and a half inch drives or more two and a half inch drives should you see fit so that is up
to 12 total drives just with this
innovative piece of metal so these guys are fully dampened
these ones are partially dampened you can see there's dampening here but they
had to cut this out so that there's space for graphics cards and it's fully
dampened up here so you're still putting in up to four screws per drive which is fine
these are not damp dampened they're optical drives so that's just fine and this fly over here is not dampened if
you really need you know ten drives and you've already replaced both of your
five and a quarter inch drives with hard drives then you can put it in there um
and you'll be happy i hope with that result because
that's already kind of ridiculous ha front court front panel connectors so
here we find pretty much standard fare we've got our internal usb 3 and they do
include an adapter in case your motherboard does not support usb usb3
via an internal header just do that alternately you can source one of those
other adapters which i actually just
grabbed one i don't know what i did with it so whatever you can source adapters
that allow you to turn one of these into a pass-through through to the to the
back of the case as well and you can just run it through pci slot okay we've
got our front uh power and reset switches as well as
power led so that front led and then we've also got our hard drive led so two
leds in the front we've got our front hd audio and then we've got pretty much
just the connectors for our fans so we include
three 120 millimeter fans although you can install just a whack load of other
fans so i made a mistake and i said you could install a 120 millimeter fan here
at the beginning of the video you cannot that is a filter for the bottom of the
power supply so you can install up to five 120 millimeter fans if you take
this guy out and then you can also do right use or you can do
this is that part where you can do the multiple different configurations so if you want to do the 80s or the 60 mils
depending on what kind of a motherboard you have in this is your standard atx
width and your standard atx length so you do have to remove some of this stuff
or make it more low profile in order to make room for it i think the inside is
fairly self-explanatory i once you get past this which is not self-explanatory
at all but now that i get it is actually still fairly easy to use so you install
everything in it you install your components in here
you do like kind of a test fit where you look at it really carefully as you as
you make your way down and then you have successfully crammed
or while silverstone has successfully helped you cram more hardware than i
would have even thought possible in a small space as well possible so whether
you need dual cpus and you know 64 128
gigs of RAM in your media pc or not now you can thank you for watching this
unboxing and first look on Linus tech tips and don't forget to subscribe