Review: be quiet! Silent Base 600

by Parm Mann on 6 October 2015, 12:00

Tags: be-quiet

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qacuza

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Specification and Test Methodology

be quiet! Silent Base 600 Specification

General Case Data
Form Factor Mid-Tower
Motherboard Compatibility ATX, Micro-ATX, Mini-ITX
Dimensions (L x W x H) 495mm x 230mm x 493mm
Colour Options Black, Orange, Silver
Materials 0.7mm Steel, ABS Plastic, Nylon
Weight 8kg
I/O Panel 2x USB 3.0
2x USB 2.0
1x Microphone
1x Headphone
Expansion Slots 7
Drive Bay Capacity
5.25in 3
3.5in 3
2.5in 3
Cooling System
Pre-installed fans (mm / rpm) 1x 140 / 900 @ front
1x 120 / 1,200 @ rear
Optional fans (mm) 2x 140/120 @ top
1x 140/120 @ bottom
1x 140 @ front
Optional liquid cooling radiator support (mm) 1x 120/140 @ front
1x 120 @ rear
1x 240/280 slim @ top
Fan Controller 3-step
Maximum Component Support
CPU Cooler 167mm
PSU 290mm
Graphics Card 290mm / 400mm (w/o HDD cage)
Price and Warranty
MSRP Silent Base 600: £79 / €109.90 / $109.90
Silent Base 600 Window: £94 / €124.90 / $119.90
Warranty 3 Years

Comparison Chassis

Chassis Form Factor HEXUS Review Reviewed Price Product Page
Antec P380 Full-tower May 2015 £160 Antec.com
be quiet! Silent Base 600 Mid-tower October 2015 £94 Bequiet.com
Cooler Master MasterCase 5 Mid-tower August 2015 £90 Coolermaster.com
Cooler Master Silencio 652S Mid-tower May 2015 £75 Coolermaster.com
Corsair Carbide Series 100R SE Mid-tower June 2015 £50 Corsair.com
Fractal Design Define S Mid-tower April 2015 £70 Fractal-design.com
Nanoxia Deep Silence 5 Full-tower September 2015 £115 Nanoxia-world.com

HEXUS Chassis Test Bench

Hardware Components HEXUS Review Product Page
Processor Intel Core i5-3570K (quad-core, overclocked up to 4.40GHz) April 2012 Intel.com
CPU Cooler be quiet! Dark Rock 3 - Bequiet.com
Motherboard Asus Sabertooth Z77 - Asus.com
Memory 8GB G.Skill Ripjaws-X (2x4GB) DDR3 @ 1,600MHz - Gskill.com
Graphics Card 2x EVGA GeForce GTX 970 SSC in SLI (2x 4GB) April 2015 EVGA.com
Power Supply be quiet! Dark Power Pro 10 (750W) July 2012 Bequiet.com
Storage Device 120GB SanDisk Extreme SSD March 2012 Sandisk.co.uk
Monitor Philips Brilliance 4K Ultra HD LED (288P6LJEB/00) - Philips.co.uk
Operating system Windows 8.1 (64-bit) October 2012 Microsoft.com

Test Methodology

To get a truer feel of how today's chassis perform, we've revamped our test platform to better illustrate the noise levels and heat build up of a modern-day build. Most chassis become hot and noisy when attempting to cool our previous platform, which consisted of dual Radeon HD 7950 graphics cards, so we've refreshed our GPUs, CPU cooler and PSU to offer a more accurate depiction of the current hardware landscape.

Our Z77 test platform now consists of an ASUS Sabertooth motherboard, an Intel Core i5-3570K processor overclocked to 4.4GHz, a be quiet! Dark Rock 3 CPU cooler, 8GB of G.Skill Ripjaws-X memory and two factory-overclocked EVGA GeForce GTX 970 SSC graphics cards in an SLI configuration.

To find out how well the chassis can cool this particular setup, we log CPU temperature while encoding a large 4K video clip. This task puts full load on all available CPU cores and we extend the stress test by carrying out multiple passes. In order to provide a stabilised reading we then calculate an average temperature across all cores from the last five minutes of encoding.

To get an idea of graphics-card cooling performance, we log GPU temperature while playing Tomb Raider at a 4K resolution with Ultimate quality settings and SLI enabled. Last but not least, we also measure chassis noise by using a PCE-318 noise meter to take readings when idle and while gaming.

All chassis are tested only with the standard manufacturer-supplied fans (any/all of which are set to 'silent' in the Asus BIOS or low-speed using a fan controller if present), and to take into account the fluctuating ambient temperature, our graphs depict both actual and delta temperature - the latter is the actual CPU/GPU temperature minus the ambient. For the record, the ambient temperature while testing be quiet!'s Silent Base 600 was recorded as 19.4ºC.