Deep Silence 5 Rev. B Large Full Tower Computer Case - White (NXDS5WB)

My build consists of ASUS Z10PE-D16 WS mother boards, 256 Gb memory, dual 2697 xenon processors, dual nvidia 3090's, 8 x 4TB SSD's, and Noctua fans all around. Other than when the GPU's are running full bore you can't hear them running. It helps that I put a table/open rear box over them. The fans that came with it were replaced with Noctua's due to the fact that you can hear the originals running under high processing loads. Very solid case, reminds me of the old AST Premia server cases.

I bought this because this may be the only case that (a) can support at least eight 3.5" drives, (b) has two front fans, (c) has passages for exterior liquid cooling tubes, and (d) makes an effort for noise suppression. Out of bazillions of available cases out there, this is the only one I have found that actually has all of those things. I only wanted white because it makes it easier to see inside when I'm working on it.I have built well over 100 systems, but this is the first using a case as expensive as this one. In short, despite having a lot of features, this case suffers from a lot of fit & finish problems. And it really isn't all that quiet. In some aspects it does seem like a quality product. It is big and heavy. It actually comes with an instruction manual and all the little screws you will need organized in nice little labels baggies. But as I will explain, it has some irritating problems.Space: This case has a lot of space. A lot of spaces for drives in particular. You can have 8 internal 3.5" drives behind the front door. Then you have another smaller drive cage that sits on the bottom. In all you could house 11 3.5" drives without having to be resourceful with the 5.25" spaces. Or you could use some of this space for 2.5" drives. They give you an insert that will hold six 2.5" SSDs, which you could put inside one of the cages. This case definitely wins on space.Sound: Despite the title, this case really isn't very silent. You would think it would be completely silent given its construction. It is heavy with coated interior walls, plus foam inserts on nice heavy front doors. The three included fans are quiet. But this case is not going to miraculously make your system quiet. If you have a howling CPU fan, you will still hear it. If you have chattering hard drives, you will still hear them. In my case, I have a howling fan that cools a RAID card - can still hear it plain as day with the cover on. It might be that this is about as good of a case as one can get for acoustics, but it will NOT make your system silent if you have any noisy components. It tries, but it is no miracle.Fit & Finish: This is where I have a lot of problems with this case. First of all, nothing threaded goes smoothly. This is the only case I have used where I had to use pliers to screw in the motherboard standoffs. Usually you should be able to screw them in by hand - maybe use some pliers to tighten them if you really want to. With this case, I had to use pliers to screw in all of the standoffs except one. I'm not sure if each was crossthreaded or if there is paint in the threads that makes it so difficult, but every one was a battle. The case is full of large knurled screws that, in other cases I have used, should be able to be hand-tightened. Not these. I had to use a screwdriver with every one of the large knurled screws. I don't have a black version of their case to compare, but I wonder if it is the white paint that is responsible. Is it possible that they just took a black case and painted it white? If so, that would explain how everything threaded is such a PITA to deal with - paint in all the threads would definitely cause this.There are similar problems with the hard drive trays. Compared to other cases I have worked with, these hard drive trays are the flimsiest, made of very thin metal. In other cases I have worked with, the hard drive trays would smoothly and easily slide in and out. Not these. They are a tight fit in two of the hard drive cages. In the third cage they are so tight that I thought that I was given the wrong size. This is where the flimsiness of the trays works to your advantage because they are so thin that the metal bends easily and deforms enough to cram it in. Eventually I realized that if I pushed really really hard I could get them in. Again - is this being caused by an extra coat of white paint?I'm using an ASUS Prime X399-A motherboard. When I got it all done, one of the irritating things is that the PCI slots don't line up quite right with the case slots. All of my I/O ports (such as the video card) are shifted too far to one side of the slot, making it difficult to plug things in. I loosened all of the motherboard screws and tried to get some wiggle room to shift the entire board in an effort to line things up with the case slots, but no wiggle room was to be found. Maybe this is ASUS' fault for not making their motherboard mount holes bigger to provide more adjustment. In addition, all of my video capture cards end up a few mm too short to fit what should be a standard height for a card, making it impossible to put in the screw that secures each card to chassis. So whose fault is this? Maybe it is ASUS's, maybe it is this case. I don't know.Water grommets: One of the reasons that I bought this case is because of the presence of rear holes for routing external cooling. This case has four of them(!) which is great, but the grommets themselves are worthless. As soon as I ran my coolant pipes through them, the grommets immediately pulled off the holes. I pushed them both back on, and they immediately fell off again as soon as the tubes moved. Not a big deal, as the grommets really aren't critical for this to work, but definitely not a good design.I'd give it 2.5 stars but rounding up to 3.