Gadgetory

Silverstone is the odd man out in the case market the cases of power and cooling manufacturer has somewhat of a boutique shop feel some of the cases like the old SGO 8 and of course the Raven RB 0-2 and we've liked some other cases well have in the past but they've had some fierce competition in the US and global markets and of course Corsair and coolermaster among the top two competitors with NZXT kind of dominating parts of the US market right now including parts where this case is competing and this is what we're looking at today in the past we've really liked Silverstone's raven our v02 which was the first rotated motherboard case that we tested later testing these 600c by corsair and that also had an inverted motherboard layout and now we're looking at something where standards this is a mid tower ATX case that retails for about $70 for the windowed version but there's a quiet version available also and this is called the silverstone coop like al 0 5 BW so it's got the most friendly name possible as always check the article link to the description below for the full teardown on case internals build quality and thermals and methodology but we're gonna go through most of that here at at least a top level the KL 0-5 is targeted at mid-range PC builds with an entry to mid-level budget for the case cooling has long been a strong point for Silverstone cases we've reviewed anyway and the company has kept a function over form attitude toward cooling and thermal design although the KL 0-5 still boasts expansive support for various cooling solutions the case itself ships relatively bare-bones it has a single 120 millimeter front intake fan and that's with the windowed version of the case silverstone also takes the approach that any tower cooler will sufficiently exhaust its heat through the rear ventilation without a pre-installed 120 millimeter rear exhaust fan similarly anyone buying a radiator can use the ample Headroom to install their cooling solution and won't need pre-installed fans since any consumer grade CLC includes its own fans so the single 120 millimeter front intake solution does kind of make sense as long as you're putting in either a good tower cooler or a radiator for your CPU cooling that makes the chaos 0 5 an interesting enclosure since its start simplified and cooling design it lowers cost it's about $70 on Newegg but we ran it through the thermal bench as we always do and even tested a few alternative cooling solutions within the in one such test we installed the bottom intake fan in another we removed the hard drive cages which are modular to see if air flow would perceptibly improve to the GPU and then we also did that with a bottom and take fan installed our test methodology is entirely defined within the article linked in the description below let's run through the thermals before digging into the build quality ease of installation and cable management's CPU thermals before the silverstone Cale zero 5 BW landed at 40 1.7 C delta T load one of these stock configuration making it cooler than the fantex P 400 if the Rosewell gun near and marginally cooler than the s3 40 but not quite as low as the 600 C which is still at the top of the bench here's where it gets a little more interesting removing the hard drive cages it drops the thermals to 40 point 8 Celsius so just under 1 Celsius difference and that make it a worthwhile endeavor if you legitimately had no use for the cages if you're running an SSD only adding the rear exhaust fan something that seems obvious in a stock configuration choice actually does little to impact cooling compared to the marginal added investment and drops thermals to 40 point 3 Celsius or 40 point 4 3 Celsius from 41.7 Celsius which isn't much of a gain for the extra fan cost so it makes sense that silverstone tested and opted out of that setup for the stock configuration moving that fan to the bottom intake port sees a reduction to 40 point 4 0 Celsius effectively the same as rear exhaust but that's all for the CPU cooler and doing things with GPU thermals actually impacts it a bit more the KL 0 5 stock configuration runs the GPU pretty warm at 59 point 5 Celsius behind every other case on the bench but adding a rear exhaust fan doesn't really do much to help either so again it makes sense that silverstone did opt out of that rear exhaust fan which so many cases do tend to include a bottom intake fan as we've traditionally found to be the case changes everything for the GPU and suddenly GPU temperatures drop to 52 is Celsius from 59 point 5 Celsius major difference and that marks the KL 0 5 as the best performer on the bench for GPU thermals if it weren't for the hard drive cage we'd suggest this as the stock configuration but adding a 121 litre bottom fan does require removal of the cages and limits the PSU space or the actual usability of this solution is pretty limited any basically running an SSD only the next best trade off and it is a good is to remove obstructing cages to improve thermals to 53.9 eight Celsius again a large gain over the fifty nine Celsius temperature of the stock configuration so if you can act even one of the harddrive cages you'd be in a pretty good spot for GPU thermal temperature is overall aren't particularly exciting but they're not offensive GPU thermals can certainly improve with some minor changes by the user and if we were just suggest one change it would be that anyone running an SSD only configuration immediately remove unused hard drive cages because it will actually improve GPU breathability in noticeable ways for Silverstone cooling performance is a little bit of let down compared to the previous products that we've looked at from them including the Raven series cases but the efficiency of Silverstone's single fan cooling solution is impressive if dragging a bit behind some of the immediate competition thermals aren't everything and with how similar cases are in this particular part of the market these days it's really important for build quality ease of installation and cable management features to be at their top class for every product because between things like the NZXT s340 the corsair 400 see both of those cases flank this case in price and then of course there's other competitors like the Rosewell gun near which we weren't big fans of but did just come out and his price the same as this case so it's a fearsome market and having those build quality and the ease of installation sort of features at the top of the specs list are very important to building a product that's worth considering since there's just so much saturation in the 70th dollar case market the exterior of the case is relatively inoffensive and plain but it's got discreet stylisation on the front panel silverstone uses thick plastics for the front and top panels then the usual steel for side panels the paint is consistently coloured across all materials which is kind of a rare thing in these $70 cases and it's also got an easily removable front dust filter that allows for quick cleaning of the front intake and also an easily accessible dust filter for the bottom and other relevant places the top panel is one of the pieces that I'm most interested in with this case so it can fit to 40 and 280 millimeter radiators in that top mounting position and radiators can be readily mounted above the chassis and within that large top panel allowing for cleaner build and isolated cooling at a part that I have to reiterate here is that the top panel is very easily removed and that's one of my favorite aspects of this case case disassembly is hard to get right and being able to take parts off without snapping plastic clips is a win for Silverstone something that other companies of course are included recently in NZXT in the past can't always pull off correctly internally a stack of hard drive cages sits atop the bottom intake port removing the cages would also allow for installation of a bottom intake then for of course better GPU cool and as we showed just a moment ago cabling is difficult to hide in the case and this is the first case without a shroud that we've reviewed in quite a while so we're not really used to showing the exposed cables from the PSU but that's not a bad thing not every case needs a PSU shroud and frankly a lot of them execute the shrouds really poorly look at the rows well gun-deer for that the lack of a PSU shroud in the klo v allows for more traditional harddrive support optical drive support and reduced cost overall keeping the case more evenly priced in the saudi dollar bracket but silverstone could have done a much better job with the cable management there needs to be a cutout for example above the PSU for access to the FPC USB and audio front panel headers instead what we have is a forced pass through with the larger cables which positions the front panel connectors farther away from their destination on the motherboard and that coupled with Silverstone's use of traditionally colored front panel cables the colored cables rather than the blackout cables means that front panel connectors are plainly visible and pretty ugly the pastor's for the 24 pin header are aligned well though and reasonably wide and the EPS pass-through is also wide enough to accommodate most motherboard EPS 12-volt positions everything else is fairly standard the build materials are sturdy and good the modular hard drive cages allow for some level of cooling versus storage customization and the optical drive cages exist if you really wanted them the panel construction is really one of the best features of the case especially this top panel where it's deep enough to fit basically all radiators except for maybe some of those Antec cooler ones with the pump mounted to the radiator and it's also got the rails solution so you can just screw it in unscrew it and then shift as needed so there's no snapping of plastic alligator clips as we see on a lot of other cases so that's a big thing I like here it's a few more screws to access but it's just more sturdy and if you're lifting it up by the top panel it's not going to fly off on you so these are things that other case manufacturers should really look into and then in terms of cooling clean performance is okay it's not exciting but if you remove those hard drive cages the GPU performance improves so substantially even just from removing the top cages that it's actually one of the best cases on the bench and the best case on the bench in some scenarios so if you only need a few hard drives maybe three hard drives because three per cage you could just get rid of that top drive cage and then use only the bottom one and that would really substantially improve your thermals and the $70 price range the Cale zero five offers a well constructed minimalistic elite cooled enclosure to do battle with a sea of smaller cases with psuche routes and those are kind of getting boring in some ways the ko0 five has more traditional drive support large radiator support a well-built paneling system and values build quality over some of the aesthetic items like better ko Management or better windowing on the side panel now it's just up to silverstone to start finding better names than the likes of k l0 v BW k l0 v BQ r VZ 0-2 and things like that but otherwise we like this case reasonably we would strongly suggest looking into things like the NZXT s340 the fan tax P 400 and the Corsair 400 C for cases within the $30.00 range of this one but otherwise it's really not a bad case if you like the look of it as always if you like this type of coverage check out the patreon like the post roll video to help us out directly links in the description below over the full article review tear down all that stuff subscribe if you like it and we'll see you all next time