Be Quiet! Silent Base 800 Review

Interior

While the side panels rely on thumbscrews, the other panels are trickier to remove. Both the front and roof panels require you to unclip them from inside, and the front one is particularly tough to get off. That said, you shouldn't need to remove this panel much, since optical drives, fans and the dust filter are all accessible without doing so. You can also remove the bottom panel, for which you'll need to unscrew four interior screws before sliding it off.


Over the past few years, a number of features and signs of quality have gone from being pleasant rarities to staples of the mid-range market. Thankfully, Be Quiet! has been paying attention, and as much we find the interior of the Silent base 800 to be well machined and painted flawlessly. There are thumbscrews for the PCI brackets, a large cutout for CPU cooler backplates and pre-drilled motherboard mounting holes as well as a small standoff that will hold your motherboard in place vertically while you get your screws ready. The interior is also spacious, and the tool-free 5.25-inch mounting clips ensure that all hardware is easy to install.

The Silent Base 800 has two 3.5-inch hard drive cage, one three-bay and one four-bay. They're held in place by a series of thumbscrews on both sides of the case and are both modular. However, the rails could do with a bit of fine-tuning, as it's rather stiff getting the cages in and out. The chassis does not use universal drive mounting trays like most cases. Instead, a single 2.5-inch drive can be screwed into the roof of each drive cage, and another two can be installed behind the motherboard tray on individual trays held in place with thumbscrews – you don't need to remove your motherboard to use them.


With the lack of drive trays, the drive cages are pretty open, so shouldn't impede airflow too much. 3.5-inch drives are installed using silicon rubber rails which are fixed to drives using thumbscrews. It's a tool-free method that's slower than using snap-in trays but one that provides much better decoupling of drives from the chassis so as to hinder vibrations.

As well as the decoupling of hard drives from the case, Be Quiet! ensures other moving parts are isolated too. All three fans are mounted using rubber washers so they don't make direct contact with any metal, and rubber feet and padding around the case ensures the same is true for the PSU as well.


In terms of water-cooling support, the Silent Base 800 isn't overly impressive, especially given that it's actually quite big for a mid-tower chassis. The roof can house a slimline 240mm or 280mm radiator with a single set of fans. Thicker set-ups may be possible with 240mm models as the mounting holes for these mean they can be offset, but it all depends on how far the bits on your motherboard jut out into the case. Otherwise, you're limited to 120mm radiators in the rear fan mount or 140/120mm radiators up front – that's the official word, at least, but it shouldn't be too difficult to mod a 240mm radiator into the front section. Any front radiator requires you to remove both drive cages, but Be Quiet! does allow you to move the three-bay cage into the optical drive section if needs be.


For cable routing, there are four main holes – three to the side of the motherboard tray and one below, and they are well positioned and sensibly sized. We really like the orange highlights on the grommets, which stay fixed in place even when threading multiple thick cables through them at once. There's also a handy hole in the top left corner of the tray for the EPS12V connector and fan cables from the rear and roof. Space behind the motherboard tray is adequate, but we would have liked more hooks to strap cables down to – we only counted four.