YOU’VE JUST SPENT what feels like years speccing out your new custom PC. On paper, it is a behemoth, ready to provide you with framerates higher than your eyes can comprehend. However, you’ve still not decided what chassis you should use. There are endless choices—you could even wall-mount it. Ideally, though, you need to pick a case that not only offers great aesthetics, but functionality and quality as well. A handful of brands come to mind, like Be Quiet. Is its Shadow Base 800 FX the one you need?
Be Quiet has a range of cases. As the name implies, this 800 FX falls into the Shadow Base range. These chassis aim to provide excellent air flow, and are typically one of its larger models. So straight off the bat, we wouldn’t recommend building an ITX system in here unless you want enough excess space to start a whole new ecosystem as well. Yes, this is a very spacious cage— there's plenty of room in the interior, even with an E-ATX system inside. Not only does this help when building your PC, if you need to make any tweaks or improvements, there's room to do so. There's enough internal storage to fit radiators of up to 420mm in length, and cer tainly an RTX 4090 GPU.
Here, we have the white variant, and despite its size, it’s sleek and modern. It features slim ARGB accents that give it that modern feel without being overkill. To cycle through preset color schemes, there's a dedicated button on top of the case. There’s also an ARGB/PWM hub pre-installed where you can add more RGB devices. Fur ther ARGB vibrance comes from the four included Light Wings White 140mm PWM fans. Again, these offer a slim ring of ARGB rather than the blades also being colored. It’s the right amount, so you can quickly change the theme of your PC without it looking like a light show.