SilverStone DS380 Review

Performance Analysis

Noise-wise the fans were pretty audible at 12V but thankfully did appear to shift quite a bit of air. In fact, we'd almost say it was worth having an air vent on the far side panel to allow the warm air having cooled the hard disks to be blasted out the other side. A CPU delta T of 54°C was roughly what we expected from a case that's primary cooling goal is hard disks rather than CPUs. This is 13°C off the pace of SilverStone's own Raven RVZ01, but clearly the cases are built for very different purposes. Again, we should stress that this result isn't directly comparable as neither our usual mini-ITX PSU or graphics card fitted in the DS380.


The GPU delta T of 53°C is around 12°C warmer than we saw in our GeForce GTX 750 Ti review, which isn't a bad result although this is a very efficient low-end graphics card. Still, we'd imaging respectable results from a longer GPU, although we can possibly see most people using the DS380 as a server/HTPC so an AMD APU-based system may be a more popular option anyway.

Conclusion

There's no doubt that the DS380 will out-live many other PC cases. It's extremely sturdy indeed and had enough airflow to deal with plenty of hard disks and some fairly decent hardware. We've got no qualms about recommending it if no other mini-ITX offerings suit your needs in terms of large amounts of storage. However, we do feel the ability to house a large graphics card is probably not best-suited to the DS380. It's certainly possible, and as our testing showed, super-short PCB models such as the GeForce GTX 750 Ti don't even interfere with the large drive cage.

It's likely in the APU arena that the DS380 will shine, though, or at the very least be easier to live with and build. There's limited space and very few cable tidying options so we'd be tempted to ditch a discrete graphics card and maybe invest in a PCI-E RAID card instead. After all, very few if any mini-ITX motherboards are out-of-the-box equipped with more than four SATA ports anyway, leaving you with a need to find four more to occupy all the DS380's drive mounts, and that's not even including the four extra 2.5in mounts.

As an HTPC with something like an A10-7850K with some grunt for 720p/1080p gaming plus enough space for the most storage hungry users, the DS380 fits this bill nicely, although we'd imagine it has quite a niche appeal too.