Installation

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The Silverstone KL01 is quite a small case for a tower design.  With that said, you have very limited room to work comfortably and may even encounter some issues along the way, some of which will be covered in this install portion.

What I immediately noticed with this case is that depending on the components you install, you may run into quite a number of clearance issues.  Let's start with the one that can actually be avoided which happens to be the internal drive cage.  Depending on your motherboard layout, chances are that you'll want to move the cage to the top of the chassis.  If you look at the first pic to your left above, you can see how the CP05 hot-plug adapter can actually interfere with a number of connectors on your board.  For those with standard ATX motherboards, I recommend that you lay the board on the case without actually screwing it in and see what the best position is for the internal drive cage. 

The second issue was that I was unable to install the audio module this board does feature.  The rear exhaust fan and body around it did not provide enough clearance.  For those with motherboards that come with somewhat large add-on modules for audio and other embedded features, you may have an issue here. 

Finally, I found that the motherboard layout would also have an impact on whether or not you will be able to actually make use of all PCI expansion slots.  Out of its standard 7 expansion slots, you will most likely be able to take advantage of only six with this particular chassis.

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Installing your optical drives on this case couldn't be any easier.  All you have to do is remove the front aluminum mesh bezel and slide the drive in through the front. There are no screws or adapters to attach to the drive.  Drive will lock in place via the black locking mechanism on the side of the drive cage.  They do work very well and hold the drives in place without any issues.

For those who may be in the IT field and setup or manage high-end servers with a large number of SCSI drives, the same concept is used on this chassis, only that the hard drive adapters are made of plastic rather than metal.  Installing all your drives in this fashion is quite simple.  Simply pull out the bay adapters and screw in each drive via the included special screws.  The reason you need to use the included screws is because each bracket actually has some vibration-dampening rubber grommets already in place.  They work very well in securing the drive in place and will certainly eliminate any unwanted noise from all installed drives.

The beauty of this case though is that included CP05 hot-swap SATA adapter.  With it, you never have to even open the case for maintenance or drive replacement.  Just slide the drive out from the front and put in the new one.  I was actually quite surprised to find a case in this class with such a feature.  In fact, I haven't even seen this method implemented yet on any other consumer-grade case I have used or evaluated to date.  It works well and I only wished more than one was actually included with this case.

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A final shot with all components installed.  Although this case is quite small, cable clutter is not an issue at all.  Due to all the open space on the drive cage, you can tie-wrap and hide all cables in this unused area. 

Cooling Performance

Let's take a detailed look at the test system specs first...

Temps were measured both at idle and under load.  Idle temps were captured after at least one hour of operation.  To load the system, the brand new release of Sandra 2008 was used under setting of normal.   

In terms of the software utilities used, I will provide readings using SpeedFan to grab CPU and System temps only.   In addition, surface temperatures were taken from components using the excellent ThermoHawk 200 touch-less thermometer.  Only the ThermoHawk was used to capture hard drive temperature as it provides the most accurate readings possible. 

Also note that standard air cooling was used in this setup via the stock HSF included with the X2 processor.  Ambient temperature throughout all tests was a respectable 74ºF.

Cooling performance was just about average for a case of its size and results were what I was expecting for a completely air-cooled setup.  Note though that hard drive cooling will really depend on where you choose to mount the internal drive cage.  If you plan on running only one or two drives, I would recommend you place them on the top bays so that the intake fan will provide proper cooling.  If your components do not allow you to, and you run a drive that tends to operate at fairly high temps, I would look for an optional cooling solution for them. 

Fans & Noise Levels

The Kublai KL01 ships with two 120mm Silverstone F121 fans.  These fans spin at 1200rpm's and have a high airflow rating.  However, with the intake fan, I found that the location of the hard drive had a significant impact in overall operating temperature. 

In terms of noise levels, this case does certainly run silent and noise is not an issue at all.  The fans are rated at roughly 26dBA but during testing, it certainly didn't seem this way at all.  They are silent and when paired with the right components, you can certainly build a system that will run quite silent. 

Next:  Conclusions