The be quiet! Silent Base 800 Enclosure Reviewed

Installation Results

The entire list of hardware went inside with minimal issue. The oddest thing though is working with the orange rubber hard drive grommets. They’re pretty soft and flexible so they can flop around on you a little. The SSDs mounted well to the rear SSD trays however you can’t see them from outside which is kind of a shame. It might be neat to have a couple of small windows on the back panel of the chassis to show them off.

The standard sized test radiator also fit the upper chassis. The space between the chassis and top housing doesn’t leave much room but the air will escape out the back vent. Users will also find that the rear case fan and mounted radiator/fan may conflict depending on the loop.

Finally, the side panel 120mm fan ports are nicely centered but an installed fan may hit your CPU cooler if it’s quite tall so consider this when selecting your cooler. But this should be a non-issue if you are running an AIO water cooling system or your own custom loop.

We left the cover off of the side vents to allow greater air flow. Keep an eye out when removing the cover as the thin mesh fan filter can easily slip out if you’re not careful. And yes, that also means they can be easily cleaned.

Thermal Performance

The typical burn in tests were run for an hour to get a solid average measurement. This is to see just how well the be quiet! Silent Base 800 cools the system. If air flow is poor, CPU, motherboard, and graphics component temps will be high. If the temps are high, each component’s cooling fans will spin at higher RPMs creating more noise.

We’re happy to report that the temperatures did not climb to levels that resulted in noisy fans. The Silent Base 800 moves quite a bit of air throughout the chassis. Heat isn’t going to be a factor inside this chassis no matter what you put inside it. And the side benefit is that it will “be quiet”.

Noise Levels

At first boot, the system was very quiet. The LEDs were the only hint that the system was powered up. It was far too quiet to be able to measure but an educated estimate would be under 20 dB up close. Under load, the noise just reached 24 dB generated mainly by the GPU.

A 45 dB system fan was manually maxed out inside the case. The be quiet! Silent Base 800 blocks quite a bit of noise. It blocks up to 14 dB measured from three feet away (typical distance underneath a desk). Since our 16 thread system didn’t get hot, we just barely heard it up close. Well done.