Performance
Cooling a Core i5-3570K processor overclocked to 4.4GHz should be no trouble for most mid- or full-tower enclosures, particularly with a large Dark Rock 3 cooler strapped on top. Every chassis in our line-up delivers perfectly acceptable results, though there is a degree of separation and the Silent Base 600 only just manages to deliver a sub-65ºC score.
But our initial concerns appear to have been realised - the solitary front intake is evidently stifled and our dual GeForce GTX 970 graphics cards struggle to stay within their 80ºC target. In order to keep core temperature in check, our logs reveal that GPU frequency was occasionally dialled down from 1,354MHz to 1,329MHz during our benchmark run.
Only two of the seven chassis in our line-up have succumbed to throttling, and be quiet!'s Silent Base 600 is one of them. We tried moving the front intake to a higher position free of obstruction but that didn't help, and though you could switch the fan controller to a higher speed, that would defeat the purpose of a quiet PC.
High performance and low noise is a balancing act, and struggling to achieve either one will have a direct impact on the other. Silent Base 600 is nice and quiet when idle, but below-average cooling performance causes the GPU fans to spin faster and louder under load, resulting in more noise.
