Cooler Master Silencio 452 Review

Up Close:  Interior

The interior of the 452 is traditionally laid out.  The CPU cut out, although not massive should be large enough.  What we are pleased to see though is that thought has been put into the size and location of the rubber grommeted cable management holes, with an oversized hole down by the PSU making it easier to get all those cables round the back. 

         

 

The 452 has two 5.25″ bays with one of them pre fitted with a rotary style tool less fixing device.  Cooler Master do include additional tool less fixings but as we’ll see these come in the accessories box, meaning that if you want to use them you’ll have to fit them yourself.  Not a major chore but why not just factory fit them if you’re going to include them with the case?

     

 

The main storage area comprises of two sections, with the upper being able to accommodate 4x 3.5″ HDDs and the lower an additional 2 HDDs.  Undoing four thumb bolts releases the interior wall of the upper drive bay enabling the max GPU card length to be upped from 11.1″ to 15.2″  This does still leave you space for 2 HDDs in the lower section and reveals mountings for a 2.5″ drive on the roof of the lower section.  This lower section can itself be removed easily as we’ll see when we come to the strip down.

      

 

There’s also space between the HDD racks and the PSU mounts for another 2.5″ drive, this time mounted on the floor via screws from beneath (remember those holes in the base we looked at?).  Foam pad capped mounts for full size ATX PSUs are in evidence and with the oversize management hole positioned quite anteriorly there’s little chance of it being covered over.  Moving up the back of the case Cooler Master have incorporated seven PCI expansion covers.  Unfortunately these are of the punch out type  so cannot be re fitted once removed.  Rear extract is provided by a black OEM style 120mm fan which is rated at 800RPM and just 15dBA.  Sitting just above this are a pair of rubber grommeted tubing pass through holes  

     

 

Round the back things are fairly standard, with a generous seven large cable tie points.  What is of slight concern to us though is that there is only about 9mm of cable management space back here, and as you can see there’s no management hole up top for the 8 pin CPU power cable.