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Interior Tour And Building
Side panels slide off to reveal an ATX-sized interior with seven 3.5” bays split across two removable drive cages. Hard drive noise dampening is achieved with rubber slide rails.
Though enough room exists to install a mildly oversized motherboard, platforms as narrow as 10.5”-wide block cable routing holes along the front edge of the motherboard tray.
Both sides are identical, featuring a plastic outer cover hiding a 120mm fan mount and thin, cloth-faced foam noise dampening. An extra-thick boxed edge keeps the panel flat during installation and removal, avoiding my typically harsh criticism of slide tabs.
Peel away another layer and you’ll see the twin 140mm intake fans on dual-pattern (140/120mm) mounts. Drive cage removal creates space for a front-panel radiator, according to be quiet! representatives. Though we didn’t find space for the lower cap of a double-length radiator, a 1x120mm unit should fit perfectly nearly the center of the intake panel.
Spaced 1.7” above the motherboard, the Silent Base 800 top panel features dual-pattern fan mounts to support 2x140mm and 2x120mm radiators. There’s enough space to put either the fans or the radiators between the steel chassis and plastic cover panels, and the hole even has clearance notches for the radiator’s tube fittings. If you have an extra-thick 120mm cooler, you'll get space to slide it away from the motherboard, thanks to the manufacturer’s use of slots rather than holes at that spacing.
Each drive cage includes a single 2.5” SSD mount, centered between slide tabs. The top bracket can also be removed and repositioned inside external bays, allowing the upper cage to be moved there (upside-down).
Both drive cages have a single screw on the side, which loosens and tightens a sliding mechanism. In turn, it opens and closes drive rail slots. Simply attach a rail to each side of a 3.5” drive, slide it into place and close the slot.
The Silent Base 800 includes enough rubber drive rails to fill all seven bays, separate screw packs for various devices, a cable hanger and several cable ties.
Moreover, this case has enough room behind the motherboard tray to hide most cables, though oversized motherboards will cover the routing holes at the tray’s front edge. We found that upper drive cage removal was mandatory to allow cable passage with our X99S XPower, for example.
Two additional 2.5” trays are attached to the back of the motherboard tray. Your thickest cables must be routed around any drives installed there.
Even with the smaller X99S Gaming 7 motherboard installed, we had to remove the upper drive cage to make room for an extra-long graphics cooler.
The Silent Base 800 hides all of our hardware well, so let’s see if it can cool those same components with similar stealth!
