Exterior Tour
A brushed finish on plastic doors resembles anodized aluminum under certain lighting conditions, while the remaining parts' fit and finish suggests that this model targets the enthusiast market's broad middle.
Ports are lined up along the right edge, near the front of the Silent Base 800’s plastic top panel. Enthusiasts who prefer desktop placement can drape their cables down the side, without blocking the doors. USB 3.0 (two ports) and 2.0 (two ports) are made available, along with headphone and microphone jacks. A lighted (when powered-on) power button and HDD activity LED finish the front-panel portion of the top.
A removable door covers three 5.25” drive bays, where the top (fourth) bay cover hides front-panel connectors. Removable hinges allow the door to be re-installed and hung from the right, if desired, while a foam panel inside the door potentially shields users from the noise of optical drives.
Two 140mm intake fans rest behind a foam-dampened access panel and removable fan filter, while another filter slides in from the rear to cover the power supply inlet and a bottom-panel fan mount.
Around back, we find three ingress/egress holes for external liquid coolers or cables, in addition to the 120mm cooling fan and seven expansion slots. Both the top and bottom panels are extended far enough to hide fans mounted to the outside of the steel chassis. Given the proliferation of graphics card slots at the bottom of motherboards, an eighth expansion slot probably would have been more useful than a hollow base.
The extended top and bottom panels add about 5” to the Silent Base 800’s total height, allowing some sellers to advertise this as a full-tower enclosure, even though the chassis itself (the steel box) is only 17.75” tall. That's decidedly mid-tower. Today, it gets compared to something a little more like a full-tower, Corsair’s Graphite 760T.