SilverStone Raven RVZ01: One Of The Best Mini-ITX Cases For Building A Linux/SteamOS PC

Assembling the SilverStone Raven RVZ01 was very straight forward. With this mini-ITX chassis, the ST45SF-G 450 Watt SFX PSU, and CP11 SATA cable a Linux system was assembled around the ECS KBN-I + AMD E1-2100 APU combination that was reviewed last month on Phoronix.

The dual-core 1.0GHz AMD Kabini APU with Radeon HD 8210 Graphics on the ECS KBN-I motherboard can be found for as low as ~$32 USD during sale periods. It's a nice budget AMD system that will work with either the Catalyst Linux driver or the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. The AMD E1-2100 setup is enough for light desktop tasks and even for video playback thanks to VDPAU video decoding on RadeonSI Gallium3D. While I ultimately used the Radeon HD 8210 Graphics, I did verify that the custom SilverStone riser PCI-E adapter worked fine and common AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards were fitting within the chassis.

For storage was an OCZ Technology SSD and the system memory was a dual-channel Crucial DDR3 memory kit. No slim optical drive was used given that most Linux users don't rely upon them anyways with using USB flash drives for the Linux operating system installation and digital delivery for most games/videos/entertainment.