be quiet! Pure Base 501 Airflow PC Case Review
Thermal Performance
be quiet Pure Base 501 Airflow Cooling Performance
Thermal performance is an essential factor for any PC case. Your system may look great 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).
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 Vengeance 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.
1000 RPM Fan Test
For this review, we will only be testing this case’s fans at 1000 RPM. The max RPM for these case fans is 120mm, so you can expect cooler temperatures if you simply ramp up these fans to 100%. Even then, this case is quiet. CPU-wise, this case is solid but unimpressive, though GPU thermals are a lot more solid.
GPU cooling is significantly improved over be quiet’s original Pure Base 500, and CPU thermals are very similar to before. If this case had an extra 140mm front fan, we would expect this case to deliver much better thermal results. If we were using this case with its current hardware setup, we would add two extra 140mm Pure Wings 3 fans. We would place one at the front of the case, and one at the top to deliver optimal airflow.
