So it’s been a while since we’ve taken a look at a case, so today we’re going to take a look at the Be Quiet! Shadow Base 800FX. You know lately, um, oh, it’s backwards, lately Be Quiet! has been super excited about its new like white series of stuff, but I think they’ve had white cases already for a while, but anyway, we’ll take a look at the Shadow Base 800FX, shadow, and white.
Do those two go together? Computer cases are boring; they’re unsung heroes, but you know they’re important because, one, they have to house all of your components. Two, they’re responsible for the overall cooling capability of those components. If the case itself is suffocating all the parts inside, then the case can be your bottleneck of performance if it’s a thermal issue. They’re also the things you look at every single day. So unless you have a window, which this one does, the case is the only thing you’re going to see. So anyway, the ShadowBase 800FX. Being an FX means it has integrated lighting in there. You can see that the color version of this one here is white with the little sticker. and a couple other things to note here, like its overall cooler height capability. So obviously it’s EATX; that’s nice to see. We’ll see, though. Oftentimes, cases will say EATX, and then there’s like something right there to block other cables from getting to it. But we’ll see. EATX, all the way down to many ITXs. I’m looking for the maximum cooler height, though. CPU coolers up to 180 millimeters, PSUs up to 250 millimeters long, and GPUs up to 430 millimeters long. Now I say up because you had front fans, radiators, and other things on the front of this. If you go water cooling, then that’s going to cut into some of the height or length available to your GPU. So let’s start with the unboxing. It’s got hard foam in there, which is fine to ship a case, but if you’re going to assemble a full system in there and try and ship it, that foam is not going to do you much good. This is going to suck. How I just wanted to get it over with, and it fooled me because I touched the styrofoam when I thought it was done. And then it wasn’t. I found that rather shocking. But there’s actually two cases that could be quite take a look at. We got this one right here, which is the 800, the shadow base 800, and then we also have the 701, which is actually a bigger case. You would think the 800 would be a bigger case. It’s a bigger number, but no, the 701 is actually bigger than this, but let’s go ahead and get the static generator removed from the case. That would also be plastic.
It’s a pretty fancy-looking case here. I see some things in here that I like already. So the top fan filter’s magnetic with porosity on it. It’s going to be great—probably less than 50%. That means how much of it is open versus blocked. So obviously, a larger hole in the mesh would be a higher porosity. This appears to be maybe 50-50, maybe a little bit less than that. I do like that we at least have up here the be quiet logo, so it’s not just a regular old mesh piece. Typically, if I’m running exhaust fans up here, I would remove the mesh because I’m more concerned with having as much airflow out of the top of the case as possible. Having the mesh on there is just going to reduce that airflow, but without it, it’s kind of not the most attractive looking thing. It’s a little unfortunate. You can see the black version. Like I said, they kind of have white editions coming out now of pretty much all their cases. So that’s what we’re looking at here: the white version. The manual does show us things like different fan layouts, radiator layouts, how some of the modularity works in there because you can do things like move the drive cages around, etc., how to remove your fan filters, and such. But it’s kind of nice because you can see different radiator layouts and it shows you how thick of a rad and what size rads will tend to fit. It kind of gives you an idea of what will interfere. For instance, if you were to put a really thick 360 rad in the front or 420 rad in the front, you would interfere with some of that top space. So it kind of gives you an idea of what will and won’t work. So that’s kind of nice to see. Also shows, obviously they fit 140 millimeter fans and 120 millimeter fans. Speaking of fans, we have four pre-installed light-wing fans in here. So these are not like cheapo, L cheapo case fans you would tend to throw away.
They’re just like flimsy plastic, crappy fans that won’t match anything else that you get because of the fact that the fans that they tend to put in cases are different than the fans that sell independently. But as we take a look at the inside, you can see we have four pre-installed 140-millimeter light-wing fans in white. So they match the white case, obviously. Now that the light wings have, the white light wings have been out for a year now, like exactly a year from the time that we’re taking a look at this video. But that’s just nice because that means you’re getting four off-the-shelf independent fans they also sell, which means that you could populate more in here and have them all match. Like I said, most case manufacturers will just put a cheapie fan in there that’s worth a couple of bucks, maybe on the chance that you’ll buy their case. That way, there’s some fans that are included, but I think most people that are shopping in this category or at this price point are going to toss any basic case fan anyway to put something nice in there. So these already have illumination now because we have four of the lights. So it makes me wonder now: is there going to be an RGB hub on the back of the case? I really hope there is. But there’s something else I’m seeing here. This guy right here is pretty neat. So this is removable, depending on how much space you need up here for, let’s say, ultra-thick radiators, push-pull configurations, etc. Although you need to be mindful of just how far out you can push that because it is kind of indented there, So if you’re going for a 420-millimeter radiator, you only have so much thickness before you hit this little piece right here. But I like the fact that this has this sort of scoop shape to it so that some of that air that’s making its way into the bottom component or the bottom compartment of this case would make its way to the power supply, but the power supply has its own air intake on the bottom, so the power supply has its own fan and stuff. That means that air can get scooped and pushed back up through here directly into the upper component or compartment. To see whether or not that actually helps with airflow, I think what we might do is, at the end of this video, we might hook up the smoke machine again and just see if it’s actually doing that. And then not completely smoke the place out like we did last time on accident, where we had the place look like it was literally on fire. Let’s see, we’ve got this bracket right here, which does something. It comes off; it’s obvious. It’s plastic too; it’s really flexible. This is something a lot of cases have started including in their designs now just to help cover up some of the cables, making their bends back to the motherboard. But you also need to be mindful that if you have a motherboard with a 90-degree, 24-pin layout, it actually should be okay in here. When I take this off, you’ll see why, and we’ll test fit that in a second. We’ve got a pretty decent amount of space between our top radiators and such right here before we even come close to impacting anything on the motherboard, but because it is offset, as you can see right here, it pushes the fans and the radiator closer to the side glass or the side panel so that you can clear any tall VRMs that might be existing on your motherboard. With power delivery requirements as they are today for modern CPUs, the heat sinks are getting taller and bigger on motherboards, so there can be interference there if they were to center that. The downside is in terms of being centered, and when it comes to the ease of installing water cooling, the front radiator fans, if I pop this off, are centered. Pogo pins, yep. Pogo pins are right here for RGB, right there. So the front does have an illumination ring-like strip right here and right here that will light up. And we’ll light that up in a little bit so you guys can see. This is also how you get to your fan filter, which is magnetic. You can leave it off if you want. But this is centered. So that means this is actually offset from the top. So that means if you’re doing water cooling and you want to have like nice L bends or 90 degree bends to the rad, you’ll have to offset it rather than just having it all lined up because it’s on the same plane. So one is over from the other. They are offset. You can see we have thumb screws that are captive for the side panel. So you’re not going to lose these when you go to take them off. But we also have, oh, sound dampening material, which is another key component for Be Quiet, and pretty much all their panels have this. It helps a little. There’s so many other vents and openings in this case. Sound is going to make its way out, no matter what. It does help a little bit. And it also helps dampen some vibrations that might make their way through the case. We also have thumb-captive screws on our power supply shroud. So you take this off, you mount it directly to your power supply, and then you slide the power supply in and mount it down. So you don’t have to worry about losing screws for that. These are also thumb screws that are on there. Looking at the backside, holy cow, do we have a splitter? So we’ve got our pre-installed fans and RGB. This is so nice because that means we already have their back and the front handled when it comes to fans. We don’t have to wire them up or cable-manage them. They’re already in their cable managed and plugged in. The only thing we have to plug in are the signals that are going to be coming from the motherboard. And I do like that the plugs are also white with the white cable. So here’s our front panel connector, which is a single plug because things have sort of become standardized on the front panel connectors, although there’s still some back, and whether or not that’s truly a standard, all the motherboard manufacturers have sort of adopted the same layout for power button reset button power light and hard drive light activity light, which means you can just have one plug to plug in, which makes this so nice for beginner builders not to deal with the stupid dual plugs to try and get them all lined up. We have our white USB-C, we have our sata power right there. This is going to be for our hub for our rgb as well as our fans. We also have HD audio, which to me is still, I’m still surprised this exists these days, because whatever they’re shielded, they help keep the buzzing out, but they still tend to buzz over time sometimes, depending on the quality of your other cables and shielding in your system. And then we have our signal wires here for our hub, like I said, so we have one RGB input and we have one PWM fan circuit fan signal right here. The downside of this is that having everything connected to one hub means they’re all going to speed up and slow down together. That’s not necessarily a problem; it’s just that if you have four exhaust fans on here, one in the rear and three in the top, because you’re running a 420 ride or something up there, although there’s not a lot of 420 AIOs that do exist, that means you’re going to probably have to do some balance airflow here because of the fact that you have three intake fans on the front. Now, if you’re going through a radiator on top, that’s going to reduce airflow, which means you’re probably going to have more CFM coming in the front than what’s going out the top. I only mention that if you’re super analytical about making sure that everything’s balanced with either neutral pressure or positive pressure. But this means all the fans will be speeding up and slowing down together. So if you plug this into your CPU header and you just leave it on the auto PWM, you’re going to have all your fans speeding up and slowing down all over the place based on standard PWM CPU fan header algorithms and motherboards, meaning sometimes you might load a program, and if you have a 1400K or something, the temperature can spike suddenly, which means all your fans go whew together. So beyond that, that’s everything that comes on the front panel connectors there.
I love that that’s all pre-wired. We do have space for one, two, three more, and four more fans. We only need to put three more in here to be fully outfitted. So that’s kind of nice that we have an extra one on there, but you have one, two, three, or four additional fan headers on there, which is pretty nice. Let’s see, this is our hard drive mount right here. So you can mount two and a half-inch SSDs on the backside or an additional controller. If you decide that you’re not going to use this and you want some other ecosystem in there, you can probably mount the control box to that. This guy just pops off right here, which is just a plate to fill that gap. And the reason you have this on there is because you need to be able to get your wires and stuff going to your SATA connector or your SATA drives. So you’ve got this guy. I think I just put it upside down. It’s a little crooked now. So I’m still trying to see how to get this guy out of here; there’s a screw up there. Oh yeah, there is a screw up here; there’s a black screw right under there that looks like it’s holding on this plastic piece. The reason I even mentioned that is the fact that you can scoot it over. You can move it over from there to there, giving you a little more clearance for any of the super-wide motherboards that may be wide but don’t have a 90-degree header, so they have to make the bend. That way, this is not going to be in the way. So you do have what appears to be about an extra inch or about 25 millimeters of movement to the left. It looks like you might even be able to move it. No, you can’t move it inward. So there’s that. Pretty straightforward. Looking at the bottom down here, you can see that there is just one big, gigantic opening for a much bigger power supply than anyone should ever actually really need. So I don’t see a fan mount; there’s even a fan mount right here. I see this. We have a 120 and a 140-fan layout right there. If you wanted to bring in extra air from the bottom, I guess you could. That seems to me a little bit unnecessary though, because it’s just going to, I guess, blow right up through there. That’d be an interesting test to see if a fan down there actually helps coming up into there. The fan filter on the bottom pulls out the front. And since it runs the entire length of the case, that’s important because if you have it up again on a desk against the wall, you can’t go backwards. You need it to go forward. So there is that. It is highly recommended that you leave the bottom dust filter on because the power supply is pulling in air, and any dust on your desk can make its way up there and start to clog up. So it’s much easier to pull this out and blow it out than to tip your case over and try to blow out the power supply. But other than that, it’s pretty straightforward.
There’s plenty of tie-down straps on here for cable management. There aren’t any real channels or anything like that designed for you to be able to run cables in to keep them nice and tidy. It’s just more of a flat panel back here that’s intended to cover the unsightliness of seeing those cables through the opening. There’s also no mount right here for attaching fans or anything else. We have just sort of become a staple of case design these days. A lot of case manufacturers are using this wall now to put fans on. This case is not. So it’s got a double-hard drive bracket for three and a half-inch drives. I’m not entirely sure how to use it, but I know it goes down here, and you can have multiple positions you can mount that in so that you can have support. Where’d it go? Ah, come on. So you have different positions you can move it into, so you have support for the length of your power supply. What we can’t figure out, though, honestly, is how you’re supposed to attach a hard drive to it. So this is one of our bad hard drives, but it’s supposed to attach to it somehow. And according to the picture, it’s right there, but the manual is pretty poor in this aspect. So I don’t know how I’m supposed to mount the drive to this. So take off points for their manual and their bracket design here, because this makes no sense. Like, we got screws right here, and their image shows a thumb screw there, right? And it shows how you can move it. And then it’s like having a having a hard drive attached. How? It’s just like floating there. There’s still a thumb screw. How the hell does that suppose? Okay, moving on. Not everything can be perfect. So that’s a terrible design, in my opinion. What’s not a terrible design, though, is the fact that you’ve got this additional area right here where you can mount another two and a half-inch drive, an RGB controller, or another three and a half-inch drive right here. so it can actually mount on that bracket like that if you want it to. That’s going to obviously block the back of your motherboard, where you need to be able to access it for installing your cooler and such, if you need to. So you could undo that, and then you can undo these Velcro straps right here, and then you can actually swing it away. As you can see, I don’t want to have it fall off right now because it’s tied in, but you can actually pull this off and then move it out of the way and access the back of your motherboard. So it’s not incredibly convenient if you forget to; you need access to the back of your motherboard once it’s put together, but it’s not impossible to be able to access it if you need it. Okay, so it’s really dark, obviously. We have it lit, so you can hopefully see the smoke once I start. Just a couple caveats: One, it’s a white case trying to film smoke. That’s hard. Usually, we do this with a black case. Second of all, I don’t know how well this is going to work, so let’s just see. I do not have top fans populated only in the front, and what I’m trying to see is what the overall airflow looks like, but there’s a fair amount of airflow even with the front filter on because I do have the front filter on. So you can see right here just how easily it’s picking up the smoke, and look how much it’s pushing out the back of the case, and I did tape up the motherboard I.O. shield where the motherboard is blocking that off, but I think the most important thing to take from this is, wow, check this out. It actually pulls the smoke back out of the front. If I put the smoke underneath, it pulls it back out and goes into the front of the case. But the biggest takeaway from this right now is the fact that I’m completely smoking out this room, and the airflow is so great that it’s overpowering any chance of it really scooping up through that filter. So that probably really helps with the bottom fan, to be honest. But look at how much positive airflow there is out there even with the filter on right now. It’s one of those things where I would like to venture to say that in terms of case, it has got more than enough with just those three intake fans and that one rear exhaust.
And then obviously, the cooler on top would just be additional airflow. So the Be Quiet Shadow Base 800FX is pretty good. It’s a full tower case, technically. I mean, it might also qualify as like a jumbo mid tower. I feel like the qualification between mid-tower and full-tower is sort of lost these days. The price is currently 169 US dollars. But if you look at the price, a three-pack of the light wings, white fans is $54 on Amazon. That really brings the price of the case down to about $113, right? $114. That’s actually a pretty good deal, just for the fans alone. So you can see what the lighting is right now; it’s just a very nice, clean aesthetic, available in white and black. I think it’s got plenty of airflow for any of your air-cooled components. And I think, obviously, that much airflow would be good for water-cooled components too. 420 in the front or 360 in the front, 360 on the top, 420 in the front, maybe a 280 in the top, etc. You have options. I don’t think you need to go with anything crazy in terms of adding a whole crap ton of fans to this, just whatever fans we throw in the top now for our AIO. If we did that with matched light wings so that everything is coordinated, it would be a pretty sexy-looking build, but it’s like a lot of case manufacturers want to charge you this much for a case and not give you a good fan with it. So the fact that it’s $167—I think it’s $167 on Amazon—is what it was currently going for. The black one was actually more expensive; typically, it’s the other way around, but the black one was about $10 more, which is really odd, but considering the fact that the cheapest I found for the three packs of Lightwing’s white fans was $54.99 on Amazon, it shows you that you’re getting a really good deal in this case. All right, so there you go, guys. Here’s our look at the Shadow Base 800 FX. Again, the FX just means it’s got RGB on it. So I think it’s a really well thought-out case, especially for the price. Anyway, if you guys have built in this, sound off down below what it was like. I had to assume building in this would actually be pretty simple. There’s lots and lots of room in there. And I think another important thing to consider is the fact of how quiet this case actually is. All four fans are currently running at full speed, and I know my Lavalier mic is not even picking that up, and it is less than half a meter away from me. Sure, the backside’s facing me, but the front fans are right there. And that airflow test that you just saw was with all the filters on, top and front. So it actually surprised me how much airflow it was able to create, even with the filters being pretty dense in terms of being able to catch smaller particles like hair and fur and dirt and dust and stuff like that
