The be quiet! Silent Base 800 Enclosure Reviewed

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.