Thank you be quiet! for sending us this case to review!

The be quiet! Light Base 500 LX is the newest case in the company’s Light Base series of cases. be quiet! says that the Light Base line of cases are “designed with hardware enthusiasts in mind that like to see their beloved PC components at work” and offer “performance, accessibility and functionality”. In essence, they have done their best to engineer a quality case that runs great, looks better, and isn’t a pain to build in. How well have they achieved those goals?

The Light Base 500 LX is a dual-chambered mid-tower ATX case with four removable panels, three of which are easily removed by popping them out while one is secured with screws. The front and side panels are made of clear, tempered glass with a small corner where the two meet that’s much closer to seamless than the Lian Li O11-Dynamic (the case that really put this style on the market, and my own comparison for this review). The case is built of smoothed, rounded metal with a textured finish on the outside that feels great and ensures you won’t be poked or cut by anything while handling it, and there are filters on most fan mounts for blocking dust that can be easily removed and cleaned. The case supports up to 360mm radiators, up to ten 120mm fans, GPUs up to 400mm in length, CPU coolers up to 185mm in height, PSUs up to 200mm in length, and finally two 2.5” drives and (technically) one 3.5” drive. More interesting is its support for motherboards with back-mounted PSU connections thanks to holes in the motherboard tray and two PSU configurations.

The biggest revolution this case provides is its innovative use of its dual-chamber design. The Lian Li, for instance, has the two chambers fully separated, with the section behind the motherboard serving as space for PSUs, hard drives, fans, cables, and more. But be quiet! have chiseled out part of the front panel and back chamber with a pillar that runs diagonal to the wall separating the chambers inside the case. This lets them pull fresh air straight from its surroundings and funnel it directly into the front chamber without having to go through the back. However, they took it a step further by designing a fan mount for this pillar. This mount can be pulled up out of the top of the case by loosening one screw, allowing fans to be easily installed, replaced, or cleaned, then slid back inside the case.

Let’s now talk about the inside. Behind the motherboard plane in the back chamber, the 500 LX allows you to choose if you want your PSU mounted near the top or near the bottom of the case. Whichever slot you choose, the other can be used for mounting any 3.5” or 2.5” drives via a convenient removable bracket. In the LX, one of the slots intended to be used for a 3.5” drive is taken up by a fan controller. However, as I only have NVMe SSDs nowadays, I was able to easily flip the controller around and screw one of its four mounts down to keep it tight and regain a second 3.5” mount. To be clear, this isn’t what be quiet! expects (or likely wants) you to do, but… It did work, though it isn’t perfect. I say this for anyone with two 3.5” drives as the LX only supports one on paper and with two HDDs I wanted to keep, this solution allowed me to mount them without much issue.

 The hulking 5070 Ti I owned that kept me from closing the side panel in my Lian Li fit perfectly in the 500 LX. Additionally, be quiet! designed the cable routing in this case perfectly. The routing and gaps across the case allowed easy access to the back chamber for hiding cables everywhere, and allowed me to easily route cables from one side of the PC to the other. They also designed holes for the fans in the detachable pillar and the floor of the front chamber, letting them sit nearly flush with the metal, but went a step further by designing cable routes from the fan mounts to the back chamber so that cords need not be visible and complete its sleek, clean presentation. The holes cables pop out of do lack the rubber grommets brands like Lian Li and NZXT use to hide the back chamber, however this makes connecting and moving cables much easier, so I’m neutral on this. But how did it stack-up against the Lian Li case—formerly the poster-child of dual chambered cases and, arguably, one of its best competitors in the space?

I moved over my existing PC configuration, using my own Noctua fans instead of the 500 LX’s installed fans, and tried to match my configuration in the Lian Li. Tests were run with 3DMark’s Steel Nomad benchmark, as well as Prime95 and Furmark for thermal stress-testing. As my system was not thermally throttled, actual results and performance between the two cases was negligible. However, when comparing thermals, the be quiet! case managed to be consistently cooler in all tests. When comparing the GPU temperatures in all tests, it scored nearly 3-5C° cooler on average. My CPU tended to slowly warm for 5-7 minutes before maxing out the cooler and keeping a max temperature for the remainder of the test. When looking at the data, the be quiet! case again showed temperatures 3-5C° lower than the Lian Li during this warming phase, but only managed to keep the max temp around 1-2C° lower. When looking at the temperature of NVMe drives close to the CPU and GPU, the be quiet! showed the same temperature delta against the Lian Li case. It’s clear that with a normalized fan speed, the be quiet! performs notably better than the Lian Li.