Arctic Cooling Silentium T11 Case and HC01-TC HDD Cooler Review

1. Introduction2. Packaging, Bundle and HDD Cooler3. The Arctic Silentium T11 (1)4. The Arctic Silentium T11 (2)5. Installation6. Testing Methodology and Performance7. Closing Thoughts8. View All Pages

We started the installation process by securing the power supply to the back of the case using four screws.  Arctic don't provide these in the bundle so make sure you find some appropriately-sized screws before you start your build – these should be included with your PSU.  The next step of the build process is to install the hard drive as the orientation of the hard drive bay would make it exceedingly difficult to insert or remove a drive after the motherboard has been installed.

Then, we are instructed to install the optical drive into the top of the machine.  At KitGuru we no longer use optical drives for testing as we prefer to install the operating system via a USB flash drive.  But in this review, we are also testing the HC01-TC hard drive cooler which fits into an optical drive bay so we installed that instead.  It is a very simple process, requiring us only to remove the front of the case and slide in the cooler.  It can then be secured using the tool-less brackets on either side of the case.

Next we installed the motherboard.  Please note that the T11 doesn't have a CPU backplate cutout in the motherboard tray so you must attach the CPU cooler to your motherboard before installing it.  We are also required to screw in a number of motherboard stand-offs before screwing down the motherboard.

Installing the graphics card is easy once you manage to locate a couple of screws to secure it with.  There is plenty of room to install a sizable graphics card as the T11 supports cards up to 14″ in length.  It isn't very easy to achieve a tidy build in the T11 as there is almost no room behind the motherboard tray for cable routing.

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