Cooler Master Silencio 550 review - Introduction

Cooler Master releases many chassis lately, next to their cooling solutions and power supplies that is. One of the models released a little while ago was the Silencio 450. That model seems to be popular yet could use a few tweaks.

As such Cooler Master went back to the drawing table and improved the Silencio 550 as shown today with better cable routing, all black interior and an extra retaining hole.

The Silencio as the name implies is a series for the true audiophiles that hate noise, I mean face  it the PC can make a lot of noise these days with loud CPU fans and graphics cards that will rattle and ruuumbleeee. So yeah the PC can be loud.

Obviously there are many ways to get the noise levels down with good cooling solutions and silent fans. But an overlooked part of the PC is the chassis itself.

Cooler Master as such started to offer an an alternative in the shape of the Silencio 450 and 550, a mid-tower enclosure that comes with sound dampening materials on its side panels.

When you start to skimp on audio levels, the compromise will often also be airflow. Still the Silencio has a pair of 120mm fans present, one on the front and one at the back, both of which have a RPM of 800 RPM (rotations per minute) and a low noise output of course. That should be decent enough for all mainstream and even some high-end gear.

With the side panels covered and very little airflow meshes to see  the chassis still remains spacious enough for a mid-tower. You can house a good seven 3.5-inch hard disk drives inside, and a 2.5-inch tray will allow you to mount a SSD (solid state drive).

Additionally, three 5.25-inch ODD (optical disk drive) bays have been implemented, a hotswap HDD dock and an I/O panel at the top (one USB 3.0, one USB 2.0, audio connectors and an SD card reader).

Combined with an all black interior the front panel boasts a dark mirror finish with really the entire chassis colored in black.

Have a peek after which we'll dive straight in the product overview. Next page my man ...