Silverstone Grandia GD10 HTPC Chassis Review

Peter Donnell / 10 years ago

Final Thoughts

Price

Amazingly this high-end Silverstone chassis is just £69.72 from Scan.co.uk and $94.99 from Amazon.com. This is an incredible price for a HTPC chassis, as you’ll often find many will cost over £100/$160. For a chassis with this many features, you’ll be hard pushed to find anything better than what Silverstone offer with the GD10.

Overview

The Silverstone Grandia GD10 is just the latest in a long line of excellent HTPC chassis’ from Silverstone. It blends superb build quality, nice aesthetics and practicality with a wallet friendly price tag, which is pretty much all you could ever ask for from a chassis.

The build quality on the GD10 is robust; the main frame and panels all feel durable and rattle free and the aluminium front panel door is a nice touch. The inclusion of three high quality and easily accessible external dust filters are certainly a welcome feature, as they allow you to clean and maintain your HTPC without removing the entire chassis from your home entertainment setup. The front panel door is great for those who have kids in their house, as it keeps little fingers from playing with the power button, stuffing toast into the optical bay and other silliness. The front panel is also a great addition for those who love their tech to be out of sight. The clean panel design means there’s almost nothing to distract your eyes when you’re watching your favourite movie.

One thing that has impressed me about this chassis is that it holds our Sapphire R9 270X graphics card. It’s not exactly a small card to begin with and while it did take a little effort to install it around the motherboard cables, it fits; that’s all that matters. Of course, this chassis also supports ATX motherboards, so there is no reason at all why you wouldn’t be able to get a multi GPU setup in here if you needed to. HTPC’s are often defined as a multimedia setup for watching movies and other media on the big screen, but with the revelation of Steam Big Picture, SteamOS and other living room focused gaming technologies, there is no reason why the GD10 can’t be used as a gaming system.

The price of this chassis really stands out. Less than £70 for a premium quality chassis is a very good thing indeed. The fact that Silverstone have included a locking front panel, USB 3.0 support, high-quality dust filters, three high-quality pre-installed fans, versatile storage bays and more into the GD10 makes it incredible value for money.

Pros

High build quality
Great aesthetics
Washable and easily accessible dust filters included
3 x 120mm fans pre-installed
Lockable front panel
Room for long graphics cards

Cons

Cable routing can be tricky

“Silverstone continue to impress with their Grandia chassis series, packing all of the premium quality features and component support you would require for a high-end gaming or HTPC style system while maintaining an affordable price tag. Easily one of the best HTPC chassis on the market right now and a welcome addition to any AV setup.”