 So a question I find myself asking is, do we really need more quiet PC case options? And Cooler Master's answer to that was, uh, yes, we have the Silencio 652S and we will send it to you. Please do a review, please. And all I could really say to that is, uh, okay, I guess so. And while I'm randomly guessing at things, I guess my review of the LG G Watch R is going to be coming soon, so stay tuned for that, but first, this video. Cooler Master's Case Mod World series is your opportunity to show off your modding skills and win great prizes. Entries close February 7th, 2015. Click now to learn more. We'll start with a look at the outside. I quite like the aesthetic of this case. The front door is hard to even see that it's a door. It blends in with the front of the case really well. And Cooler Master just overall hasn't attempted to reinvent the already fairly functional wheel of quiet cases with simple, elegant looks, but has managed their own unique spin that makes this more than a Me Too product. The front door is lined with noise dampening materials and reveals three 5.25 inch bays underneath and a removable cover for the two included 120mm Silencio series quiet fans, and some rather curious design choices. First, I noticed that the bay covers and fan cover have a plastic patterned layer and another plastic mesh layer that gives them a very pleasing appearance, but they both lack dust filters, a bit of a given on mid-range to high-end cases these days. Next, I noticed that they might not need to be filtered anyway, since the front door includes no gaps to allow air to be drawn in through the front of the case, which means that for any filtration scheme to work, it would actually have to cover the side vents on the front bezel. So the third oddity I noticed then was that these also don't include any filters. So the overall impression of the front is that it looks really good, but leaves the primary air intake for the case completely open to infiltration by dust, a design oversight that is particularly confusing when Cooler Master went to the trouble to filter the bottom of the case, where only the power supply takes in air by default. Let's move on though. I.O. is well laid out, with anything vulnerable to being stepped on by a cat, like power and reset buttons on the front, and everything else that is dual USB 2, dual USB 3.0, headphone and microphone, and this is a really nice touch, an SD card reader on the top. Also on the top is a vent exposure mechanism that feels a lot less like a bolted-on afterthought than most silent cases, looking at you to find our five, and from everywhere but the back, appears to be just a stylized top panel. Very nice. From the back though, we can see that there are two sliding pieces that lock into place well, yet are easy to remove if you know what to do. The first one is a solid plastic layer that leaves the top looking stylishly well vented, just like the front when you open the door, and there's a second one that reveals easy mounting for top fans, so that's up to two 140 millimeter fans, or a dual 120 millimeter radiator with fans. The side panels use standard non-captive thumb screws, so be careful with them when you remove them, and other than that, their only interesting features are the noise-dampening lining on the insides, and the removable panel on the left that you'll need to remove two screws from, then pop off if you want to expose the vent that sits next to your GPU area. Moving to the inside, we find very solid construction overall, but I expect this from Cooler Master, so they don't get massive bonus points for it or anything. Sucks to be good at stuff, hey guys? So we'll continue the inside tour at the front. The five and a quarter inch cage can accept a two and a half or three and a half inch drive in the bottom bay, and is tool-less, which is good, but riveted in, which means no front triple rad mounting like the DefiNR 5. With that said, I suspect most people won't do that anyway, so radiator support for the dual 120mm front fans would have been enough for me, and it has that, but the implementation is really, really bizarre, kind of like they couldn't decide if and how they were going to do it. So, like, I saw that with the front drive cages removed, the rad could go on the inside here, with the barb side down only, by the way, which means that most AIOs won't reach the CPU socket, or even a graphics card in the top slot. At least that would have worked if Cooler Master didn't have the front fan screwed into these threaded stamped mounts that would require custom screws and very careful installation in order to do that. Then I noticed that it looked kind of like there'd be room to put the rad inside the front bezel, only, what, no, wait, not quite enough room, so at this point I finally consulted the manual and realized they expect you to buy an optional adapter to put a rad in the front. Not a good solution, but given that the top and rear dual and single rad mounts are fine, and how few people need three radiators, I'd have actually given this a pass still, if the air cooling fan installation method was really good, and that's why water cooling was difficult, but it's not. These front screws are partially threaded, presumably to prevent over-tightening of the fans, but unfortunately, due to tolerances in manufacturing, we end up with the opposite problem, where my fans actually had some wiggle in them, even when they were fully screwed in. A big no-no for a silent case, although in practice, once we fired it up, it didn't end up causing a lot of vibration, really any that I noticed. Moving on towards the back, we've got the drive bays that most normal people will leave in, that I was initially going to call over-engineered for no apparent reason, until I figured out that they're actually surprisingly clever. At the bottom, there are three 3.5-inch bays that are screwed in and non-adjustable, although you can install 2.5-inch drives in them if you want. Then the top four can actually be adjusted by relocating this piece right here, which allows the plastic sleds to then also be resized, these little wings to be lowered, and SSDs to be screwed in from the sides in such a way that the SATA power connector doesn't experience any unnecessary strain like most other solutions. Very nice, Cooler Master. Next to the drive cage, there's a spot for a filtered 120mm intake fan, or another 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch drive to be screwed in from the bottom of the case, then moving further toward the rear, we've got anti-vibration rubber feet for the power supply, an extra auxiliary PCI slot to go with the standard ATX7, three water cooling grommets, which I used to poke fun at, but now use every day in one of their other cases in our whole room water cooling setup, and finally, the third included Silencio 120mm fan. At the top, we've got an AIO dual 120mm liquid cooler that we were able to install facing either way, thanks to the mounting slots rather than holes, and without losing access to any of our three 5.25-inch bays. Very nice. The motherboard tray features a cutout for easy CPU cooler installation, yet another 2.5-inch drive sliding grommet mount, ample cable management loops, unexceptional but functional cable management holes with equally unexceptional and actually, ah, barely good enough spacing in the back of the tray to run cables between it and the side panel. If it weren't for the noise dampening material on that panel, they'd have been fine, but as it was, I had to do the push down and slide in order to get the case closed up. So, it's conclusion time. The case accepts a ton of drives, up to 9 3.5-inch and a 2.5-inch or 10 2.5-inch, or any combination thereof. It looks great and is really well-built, but it loses some marks for its open mesh that's masquerading as a filtration system and poorly thought-out front fan mounts. So, is that a recommendation for this case? Not directly, but the 652S is also not a bad choice. It just could have been a little bit better. One change in particular that I'd like to see on a V2 of this would be the ability to completely remove the front door and stealth the hinge mounting points. That, combined with the already excellent silence to high airflow transformation that's possible on the top, would turn this into possibly the best implemented versatile case on the market. Maybe at some point, Cooler Master will start letting me look at this stuff before sending me a finished product and asking me to review it, so I can send them helpful suggestions like that, but for now, we'll have to settle for just reviews, and I hope you guys enjoyed this one. Thanks for watching. Like if you liked, dislike if you disliked, leave a comment if your feelings are more complicated than this. As always, there's a link in the video description to help us out. You can send us a monthly contribution if you want us to keep making videos. 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