 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 cram is such an inelegant word to describe this product, which isn't really fair, but to cram up to 12 hard drives and compatibility for an SSI that is like uber EATX motherboard, 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 HTPC 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 pretty much, yeah, a zero compromises configuration capability without overdoing the size. You know, I mean it's one thing to design the Cosmos 2, which can fit pretty much anything, but it's the size of, you know, a plane. Whereas this is, you know, I guess a little bit more thoughtful, not to rag on the Cosmos 2 because it definitely has its place. 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 double wall here and then they, this actually improves puncture resistance, just the finish that they use on the outside as well. So it's less of a concern for me with a Silverstone box than it would be with someone else. GDOE, yeah, this is really not that big compared to something like an LC-17 or, you know, like one of their staple products that doesn't have this in on this compatibility. 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. 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 5.25 inch base 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 120mm cooling fan slots including, as you can see right here, their, sorry, push. Really push? No. 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 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. Bad baffle which apparently will make your fans perform better and be less noisy. So here you can see the 120mm cooling fan slots. I'm just going to 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, it was kind of awkward. So where we have another 120mm fan, so this one you pull off including the same baffle, doesn't include the fans by default but I mean most people who are going to be buying 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 a case like this. Here we've got three 120mm fans. Now this is also compatible with one 120, three 80s or six 60mm 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 air flow. So positive air pressure rather. So positive air pressure 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 passive little bit of air flow 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 7 plus 1 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 IO as well as two 80mm fans 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 making sure you read the manual before trying to build a system in this case because it must be, it must be pretty complicated then. 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, 6 hard drives in 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 day to day 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 and I'll just, I'll be able to tell you guys more about this. Let me start by saying that this case is probably 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 guide-y 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. It also 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 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 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 just component size limitations, so you have a whole big schwack 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. See, 6x60mm fans is for the SSI configuration. Alright, recommended coolers, graphics cards, what direction the air flow should go in in order to be optimized for your case. 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 will 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 3.25, 3.5 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 an eighth 3.5 inch drive like over here. So you actually run the SATA cables through here, so the drive sits like this I believe. 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 3.5 inch drives. You can put two 2.5 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 the risk of shorting out. So we've got two 2.5 inch drive bays here and you run the cables to those up here as well. And then finally the two 5.25 inch bays which you can also use to install more 3.5 inch drives or more 2.5 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 it up to four screws per drive which is fine. These are not dampened, they're optical drives so that's just fine. And this guy over here is not dampened. If you really need 10 drives and you've already replaced both of your 5.25 inch drives with hard drives then you can put it in there and you'll be happy I hope with that result because that's already kind of ridiculous. Front panel connectors. So here we find pretty much standard fair. We've got our internal USB 3 and they do include an adapter in case your motherboard does not support USB 3 of the 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 to the back of the case as well and you can just run it through a PCI slot. Okay we've got our front 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 3 120mm fans although you can install just a whack load of other fans. So I made a mistake and I said you could install a 120mm 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 5 120mm fans if you take this guy out. And then you can also do. Right. This is that part where you can do the multiple different configurations. So if you want to do the 80s or the 60mm 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. 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 make your way down. And then you have successfully crammed or well 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 or 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.