be quiet! Pure Base 500DX Review
Thermal Testing
Thermal performance is an essential factor for any PC case. Your system may look fantastic and seem silent from the outside, but all of that is for nought if your PC has the internal temperature of an oven. Your PC case needs enough airflow for your components to remain cool under load and to prevent any form of thermal throttling.
For our test, we used the following hardware using fixed fan speeds (so that only the case and its included fans can influence thermal performance).
Testing Hardware
Intel i9-9700K @4.8GHz at 1.2V
ASUS ROG Strix Z370-F Gaming @ 100% Current Capacity/ LL lvl16
Cooler Master Hyper 212 Black Edition @ 9V via Fan Speed Reducer
Nvidia GTX 980 Reference @ 60% Fixed Fan Speed
Corsair LP Vengiance LP (Grey) @ 3200MHz
Corsair MP500 M.2 NVMe SSD
Corsair RM550X Power Supply
The graph below showcases Delta temperatures with a controlled ambient temperature of 20 degrees Celsius.
600 RPM Thermal Test
When testing PC cases, we like to provide our readers with a variety of results. Not everyone runs their fans at their maximum RPMs, and not everyone uses fan speed profiles to limit their noise levels and airflow. So to cover all bases, we test cases with three fan profiles, a 600RPM profile, a 1000 RPM profile and a “Max” speed profile. Since the Pure Base 500DX has it fans running at 900 RPM, we will abridge these results and only include 600 RPM and “Max” RPM results.
When compared to be quiet’s original Pure Base 500, we can see that their new 500DX model does offer user improvements in thermal performance. While these thermal differences are small, it should be noted that these improvements are made without making the 500DX louder than its predecessor. This is still a be quiet case, but in this case, quiet doesn’t mean hot.
Max RPM Thermal Testing
When running the Pure Base 500DX’s fan at their maximum speeds, we can see hoe be quiet! got its name. Not many case manufacturers have the balls to ship their cases with low RPM fans, especially with an airflow-oriented design like the 500DX.
Even with this case’s slower fan speeds, it is still able to keep up with most competing case designs. The only problem that the 500DX has is that its airflow-oriented design doesn’t do much to help this case’s thermals, as the fans that be quiet use don’t produce much airflow to begin with. I guess that’s the cost of being quiet.
