CoolerMaster Silencio 352 Review

 

The Build

CoolerMaster have again favoured the “bag’o’screws” approach, leaving you to sift through the pile to find the ones you’re after.  We think the chap responsible for this maybe had a bad experience with Lego as a child, not being able to find the brick he wanted, and has decided to punish everyone else.  We do at least get a set of comprehensive instructions, opening up as they do to a large double sided sheet.

     

 

Although the PSU we’ve used in the demo build is 160mm long there’s still room behind it to turn the cables rearwards.  A longer PSU would cause problems, but then you’re not very likely to be putting a monster 1200W unit into a case this size are you.   It’s also fair to say we’re not entirely sure what we’re going to do with all the cables. 

     

 

With everything in, it all looks reasonably tidy from the front.  Granted as there’s no top hole for the 8 pin CPU cable we’ve had to run it across the top of the mobo, but aside from that it was a pretty standard build experience.

     

 

The area around the PSU looks surprisingly clean and tidy especially as there’s no grommets on this case.  We haven’t mounted any 2.5″ drives in the case, but as you can see, the vertical management holes are well aligned to accept the cables going to and fro.

       

 

We were able to make a decent fist of the cable management of the reverse side, thanks in no small part to plentiful and well dispersed cable tie points.  Although it might look like the cables are in a bunch we’ve actually laid them out flat side by side to reduce their profile, using nearly all the 10 supplied cable ties to keep them that way.  Even with these measures it was still a hell of a job to get the side panel on, leaving as it did a slight bulge when closed.  As an alternative, the major cables need not be routed round the rear as the large full length cut out along the bottom enables them to be kept on the front side of the motherboard.