The be quiet! Silent Base 800 Enclosure Reviewed

If you’re hunting for a creative flashy full tower enclosure, there are definitely plenty of those on the market that cater to gamers and enthusiasts. However, some folks want a bit less flash without sacrificing all the cool features. You know, those cool features like tooless drive bays, modular bays, room for all-in-one or custom liquid cooling loops, plenty of ideal cooling and of course something that isn’t ugly!

One such enclosure that fits the list is the be quiet! Silent Base 800. It offers all of these aforementioned features and more. And after spending quite some time showing it off at shows, LAN parties and college campuses, we have the short and sweet technical skinny to help you decide if it’s your next enclosure.

Features and Specifications

Futurelooks went all the way to Taiwan last year to find out more about the Silent Base 800 and its origins. And since then, the company has added to its line up with other versions. But the be quiet! Silent Base 800 still remains at the top as their flagship. Lets break the list down in to the tangible features you can manipulate and the chassis features like liquid cooling.

The Tangible Features

• Includes three Pure Wings 2 case fans
• Two 3.5″ hard drive bays (fastened by two thumb screws)
• Orange rubber grommets for hard drives
• Removable fan filters (bottom and front behind drop down door)
• Sound dampening padding on doors and side panels
• Space for the longest graphics cards
• Orange rubber grommets on all the cut outs

Air and Liquid Cooling Chassis Features

• Dual front 120mm vents (with two fans)
• Bottom 120mm/140mm vent
• Rear 120mm/140mm vent (with fan)
• Top dual 120mm vent (for radiator and fans)
• Three round 1″ rubber grommet rear cut outs

Supported Devices

• Three 5.25″ ROM drives
• Seven 3.5″ hard drives
• Two 2.5″ SSD trays (with thumb screws)
• Full ATX and mATX motherboards
• Up to 10″ for Power Supplies

Pricing of the Silent Base 800 starts at about $145 US for the non-window model, but funny enough, the it’ll only cost you $150 for the window model. That’s a pretty darn good price for all the bells and whistles. And it even comes in your choice of Orange, Black and Silver.

What’s Included?

The be quiet! Silent Base 800 accessory bundle is pretty meager. It includes all the basic screws for mounting drives and the motherboard. There aren’t any extra screws for radiators which makes sense given that all the different sizes. There are also only a few zip ties which is sad. Given that this case seriously supports wire management, we’d like a few reusable Velcro straps, similar to what you would find in their excellent power supplies.

Having said all that, the case itself has a lot already built in that makes life much easier when building up your next system.

Outside the Enclosure

The be quiet! Silent Base 800 is conservative in design but still offers enough character to compete with more flashy cases. In a sense, it’s very much the difference between a German sports car and a Japanese one: The German one doesn’t require a body kit or large wings to tell you it’s ready to go.

The front has orange vertical accents following the vents on each side. The bezel door has noise dampening material. The lower front of the bezel is also a padded toggle door that swings open revealing a dual fan filter and two front intake fans.

There are two square be quiet! adjustable fan cover inserts centered on the left and right panels. Users can add a 120mm case fan to each for greater air flow. The air would hit your graphics card and back of the motherboard. Just make sure you have enough space.

As for the back of the case, it’s pretty standard with water cooling holes. The bottom fan filter pulls out the back. Two slots on the bottom also lock the rail feet in place. Pretty good looking design overall.

Inside the Chassis

The be quiet! Silent Base 800 chassis is solid “jet-black” inside so if you’re using black components it can almost be completely stealth. Every last machined edge has been buffed down. The motherboard cut outs are also well machined yet still have been given orange grommets as accent colors. Again, this is just a nice extra touch for presentation.

There’s plenty of space for large graphics cards and storage. The hard drive trays are removable via thumb screws. Two rails also insure a solid mount which is a nice measure to prevent shifting. Orange rubber grommets would be used to help eliminate some noise. A very large motherboard tray cut out allows for any CPU cooler installation.

The back of the motherboard tray allows about 1″ of space for cable management. There are two SSD trays also secured by thumb screws. Simply attach the SSD before mounting.

Test System Setup

Our test components are similar to the platform that Futurelooks brought to show at Gottacon 2015. This time, two hard drives and 240mm radiator was installed to see how it all works out in a more challenging configuration. Parts included…

• Processor: Intel Core i7-5960X Haswell Extreme
• CPU Cooler: be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 3
• Motherboard: ASUS X99-A
• Memory: Kingston HyperX Predator 3000 MHz 16GB DDR4
• Graphics: NVidia GeForce GTX 980
• Storage 1: Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD
• Storage 2: Two Western Digital 1TB Velociraptors
• Power: be quiet! Dark Power Pro 850 Watt 80Plus Platinum
• OS: Windows 8.1

You may have noticed, there’s also an Intel 750 PCIe SSD installed. It’s a power house system afterall and it must have bandwidth to support Haswell Extreme as well.

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.

Final Thoughts

The be quiet! Silent Base 800 Full Tower enclosure has been a pleasant quiet experience since day one. The quality of the chassis is top notch with nothing left to chance that might feel cheap. This is the German way and we expected that the company’s first foray into the case market would indeed be at a flagship level.

The machining inside the chassis makes working inside quite literally painless, and thankfully, bloodless as well. All of the tool-less features sped things along in our build as well, with well thought out workflows throughout. It’s as if someone actually built with the case over and over again to iron out the sore points before production. Of course, that quality feel results in a little extra weight but it is well worth it.

Of course, not all full tower enclosures are perfect simply because there’s no way to anticipate what kind of components will be installed. The side panel fan port is centered just a little too close to accommodate an optional fan in most builds. In fact, any dual radiator cooler like be quiet!’s own Dark Rock Pro 3, was impeded by the addition of this fan in this mounting space. However, single tower CPU coolers work just fine.

One minor detail is the floppiness of the orange HDD cage grommets. They mount best after removing the cage which is par for the course. It would be really neat to be able to choose or change the colors of the front vent rails. Enthusiasts like being able to pick different colors but it’s not a deal breaker. And the case does come in three colors (silver, orange, black) so that you can start with your own base color of choice.

There aren’t exactly a pile of conservative yet attractive full tower cases that offer the features and $145-150 price of the Silent Base 800, depending on window or non-window configuration. Your choices are primarily mesh, square, or a little too gamer themed.

But, if you’re looking for a feature rich, inexpensive, quiet full tower, then the be quiet! Silent Base 800 enclosure is for you. Or for that matter, it’s really for anyone looking for a great combination of both performance and silence. That would be everyone.