Cooler Master Silencio 650 Mid Tower PC Chassis Review

Now that I’ve finished the build and spent a little time with the Silencio 650, I do have a couple of  issues with it, but I must stress that they are minor issues. The first would be the cable management, as demonstrated in some of our photos once the build was complete, the system actually looked fairly neat up front, even with the cables stuffed under the hard drive trays, but for a system that is as wide as this one, with such large cut-outs for cable routing, I can’t figure out why there is 1cm of clearance around the back of the mother board, meaning anything like a thick molex plug can prevent you from putting the side panel on, even harder when you remember the back panel is covered in a thick foam. But again, a minor issue, which with a little more forward thought on cable management, is a resolvable issue, albeit one that doesn’t have much of an impact regardless because once the side panel is on, no one can see inside the chassis.

The next issue is airflow, its not really a problem, but it could be if you don’t think long and hard about what you build into this system, with two 120mm fans in the front, getting air into the system through the side vents, or a little more should you open the front panel door, there isn’t much to work with, I would highly recommend the installation of a 3rd 120mm fan in the base of the chassis to help draw some more cool air into you system. While it is great that there is room for a 120mm fan in the top of the chassis and cover for it, opening the cover will obviously have an effect on the silent performance on the system, but very necessary, because if your computer needs to breath, you need to let it.

Things are shut up pretty tight in this chassis, its built to the highest degree of quality, so getting that air flow right is vital to doing this chassis justice, with the right combination of fans, CPU cooler and graphics card you can have a very slick, very stylish stealth system on your hands, even with our components installed the system was inaudible after initial boot.

This would make a great (and silent) HTPC build, for those that don’t want to go down the M-ITX route, with the addition of the HDD boot switch allowing you to dual boot from separate hard drives at the flick of a switch, such as one drive with Linux for media centre, one with Windows for everything else, what ever takes your fancy. Its little touches like the drive switch, the delicate attention to detail on what at first seems like a flat slab of metal, the heavy duty sound proofing and of course the fact it performs more than well enough to justify its £110 price tag, which is why I am happy to award the Silencio 650 our Editors Choice Award.