Final words and conclusion

Final words and conclusion

The Silverstone GD07 chassis is one of the better HTPC cases available on the market. It has a lot going from sheer aesthetics up to features and the space you can work with. Simplicity and aesthetics are the two words that come to mind when I think about this HTPC chassis, but I said that about the GD06 as well.

While we do place the focus on the HTPC aspect, reality is that it would make a rather beautiful desktop PC as well. Your choice of course. You have plenty of space to work in and you can definitely load up the chassis with a lot of components including normal height and lengthy videocards. 

The chassis is made out of black painted steel. The front panel of the SilverStone Grandia GD07 has that huge aluminum door, featuring a lock to prevent unauthorized people from removing your hard drives.

As mentioned before, we like its simplicity and its versatility. The GD07 can house five 3.5" HDDs in its bay and then there's room for two 2.5" units as well. Even the bigger ATX power supply will fit up-to a lengthy 18cm and with the current selection of mATX/ATX motherboards available you can design a serious HTPC or even regular PC. Though the chassis supports it I wouldn't go EATX though.

On mATX and ATX both Intel and AMD offer neat and near silly motherboards in terms of features and performance. You can make this as low budget or high-end as you need. Cooling wise you are covered as well as the three 120mm fans do a splendid yet silent job.

The sheer size, USB 3.0, Rubber feet, sleek black design, good interior, good connectivity, anti-vibration ODD/HDD protection and the fans are quite inaudible as well, you can only hear them remotely. Alternatively you can control their RPM over the motherboard or a small fan controller. But we doubt its needed.

Please do be aware of the fact that the GD07 supports CPU cooler at a normal size, obviously a fat Noctua D12 would never fit. There are plenty in choice available, heck even reference Intel and AMD cooler will fit fine. But the modern heatpipe based coolers could run into issues due to the height of the chassis.

One thing I forgot to mention is that the chassis has the ability to adjust the brightness of front LED, which is something very common in most home theater components, but no one did it for HTPC cases.  The GD07 and GD08 both have a little toggle/slider on the bottom front to allow user to adjust brightness to their liking or even cover the LED light completely. 

So let me wrap things up. We think the GD07 is a great HTPC chassis for the ones that need the room to work in. The chassis can be fitted with a small form factor and large ATX sized motherboards. That means you can go pretty high end with it. 

For sheer design, luxurious space, style features and price we can recommended the Silverstone GD07 very much, we had a very hard time to find any real flaws with it. It's currently priced at 140 USD and in the EU it still needs to reach the market. But if you can spot it and need it... we really don't have anything negative to say about it.

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