Silverstone Kublai SST-KL01 Case Review (update)

It is seldom that a new series of case is released from a major case manufacturer. When one does arrive from a noted case designer like Silverstone, the interest can be quite high, so I made every effort to obtain a test sample as quickly as possible to review for you. The Kublai series is supposed to be a lower end line from Silverstone but with attention to detail on the level of the Temjin series. The model I have obtained for review is the SST-KL01B.

There are two models in the Kublai series so far: the KL01B and the KL02B. The B means black, which is the only color choice so far. Either can be obtained in the -W variant, which means with window. The KL01 has a door while the KL02 without window has mountings for two extra fans behind the perforated area on the left side door. The KL02B-W lacks the fan mountings.

Silverstone Technology was founded in 2003 by renegade designers who had been working at CoolerMaster. You can see their work in CoolerMaster's early aluminum cases as well as the Wavemaster and Praetorian models. The first Silverstone models were basically OEM steel cases with nice aluminum facades like the Kublai series.

The Temjin 3 (SST-TJ03) was their first all-aluminum model and set the standard for many to come. The TJ03 is still available. Every model has at least a nicely finished, mostly aluminum bezel. Silverstone still creates the occasional all-aluminum, high-end design which routinely garners top industry awards and is often used in the annual Ultimate PC build at Maximum PC magazine. The TJ07 and TJ09/10 are the latest in the tradition. The aesthetic standards are hard to beat.

The Kublai models are the first "Stacker"-type cases from Silverstone. The base chassis for both is made of 0.6mm SECC steel and has nine 5" drive bays occupying nearly the entire front area. They are painted a very smooth, matte black that displays my greasy paw prints clearly. The KL01 hides one bay (the top one) behind the brow where the ports, switches, and light bar are, though you can probably fit another HDD (hard disk drive) in behind using the adapter that comes with the case or another that you supply - you will have to dress the front panel and ports wire bundles around it. The KL02 takes up one drive bay with its ports panel and light bar too, but it can be any bay, and you can probably also fit a HDD in behind similarly to the KL01.

On either case, the bay dress plates are thin, punched steel "mesh" over black plastic frames, and one has a removable piece for any 3.5" external device, which can be installed using the adapter brackets that are included. The bay dress plates are easily removed from the front. There is no dedicated HDD rack, but that function is served by a removable HDD cage which has space for up to four HDDs and occupies a block of three of the 5" drive bays. In the KL01, you can locate the cage anywhere you want within the eight bays, while in the KL02, there are all nine bays to choose from as the ports panel is moveable.

Peering Inside the Box

The box is sturdy enough for shipping and with color and info on all sides for the retailers.

See the large foam surrounds for each side. It is the spongy foam that does not sacrifice itself to protect from bumps. The unit got here in perfect shape after its cross-country trip (CA to NY). The case is wrapped in an unusually heavy-gauge plastic bag to protect the finish and exclude humidity. If you get a case with the window option, the acrylic will have protective peel-off sheets on both sides.

There are a few items on which to focus in this shot. Note the fan cutout. The shape is as good as it gets for a fan cutout. If you look at the template many fan companies provide for mounting their fans, this is the shape you will see them recommend. There is almost no restriction, which is by no means what you'd normally find in most similar chassis. Instead, you will normally find a very restrictive, punched, case-metal grill with mounts for 80/90/120mm fans. Next you will see that the outer low-restriction, wire grill comes sandwiched between the fan and the inside of the case. You would have less restriction with the grill on the outside of the case - fan restriction is based on the inverse square law, e.g., twice the distance, one fourth the restriction. You also can leave the grills off - yes, there is one on the inside of the rear fan too - for nearly zero restriction.

You could use vibe damping pins to mount the fan, which I will be doing after the review, though it is probably not needed. Second is the perforated card slot cover plates. Generally these are not a good idea, as they provide an avenue for subversion of your well-planned airflow scheme through the case as do the perforations above the PCI brackets - air (like electricity, water, and students) follows the path of least resistance. With the supplied fans, it is likely that air will be drawn directly in thru those openings and out thru the exhaust fan having done hardly any cooling of the system.

The buyer has been given lots of extra work to determine whether those openings are actually working as intended. I immediately covered all of those openings with transparent tape - problem solved - points given, points taken away. Such additional ventilation should be optional. Supply both solid and perforated slot covers and some way to block the venting above the PCI card bracket.

The front of the case is protected by a 3mm thick extruded aluminum door. Just above the door (and seen as a gray stripe in the photo) is a clear plastic piece which has a blue LED at each end and acts as the Power On signal. In the middle of the bar is a red LED, which is the hard disk activity indicator. In the middle of the brow is the square power switch, which has a smooth action here, though some have reported stickage. On top of the brow are the I/O ports and reset button. As supplied, the door opens to the right. This is easily reversed or you can remove the door entirely with no traces left behind. The entire front bezel, wires and all, is easily removable with just four screws.

The center image shows the front sans bezel. You can see that the RFI plate for the top bay has special, rolled edge openings for the two wire bundles from the bezel - the LED and switch wires go into the right one and the I/O port cables go in thru the left one. You can see all nine 5" bays as well as an unused cable port near the bottom. The HDD cage and contacts can also be seen.

The rear of the case shown in the right image has been thoroughly described above, but I will point out that the power suplpy is mounted very close to the top and only one way is allowed to mount the PSU. The openings for the power supply, I/O shield, and fan are sharp around the edges so take care when working around them. You can also see that both side panels are the same: removable and interchangeable.

Above you will see most of the inner features of the KL01: the toolless optical drive clips, the multitude of drive mounting holes for devices that do not work well or at all with the clips, the standard mounting holes for the motherboard and add-on cards, a wire management clip and rounded edge holes (can not see the one at the bottom, behind the HDD cage) to guide wires behind the mobo, the I/O cables and fan lead from the drive cage. The rear fan has the tach wire in a separate three-pin connector plus standard Molex for power - the front fan has a standard three-pin connector only. The CP05 SATA hot swap connector can be seen overhanging the mobo area - more about that below.

The right side of the toolless drive gear appears above. A very simple idea, it is just a pair of bumpers that guide and press the drive against the springy latch on the other side. Plenty of holes for drive screws here as well. Note that the whole mobo pan and right side of the drive rack is made of one sheet of steel, which makes for a stronger structure than you might expect from 0.6mm SECC while eliminating manufacturing steps. The wire management features are visible here as well.

The bezel has all the wires and switch gear attached to it, which is unusual these days. However, since only tinkerers such as I would ever have need of removing the bezel (since nearly everything can be done from the front with the bezel in place, it is mostly an insignificant bit of trivia. But it only takes four screws to pull the bezel, so you may want to do it just to say you've done it. The audio cable has grouped connectors for both the old and new standard pinouts. If you have a non-standard pinout on your front panel audio header, the contacts can be rearranged within the shells.

Above you see shots of the front and rear of the front fan assembly. The thin mesh covering is easily removable using a thin knife blade to pop it off the plastic frame. The right image shows the inside of the fan assembly. The three gold stripes on the right are the contacts that make the whole assembly easily removable from the front without messing with any wires. Behind the contacts' printed circuit board (PCB) is a recess for holding excess fan wire. The fan connects to the back of the PCB with a standard three-pin connector. The OEM fan has custom short wires, but the recess allows for easy use of most standard fans with wires up to a foot or so long.

Now we see a unique feature of the Kublai cases, the HDD cage. The pictures show the cage with a drive carrier on top (left) and the CP05 hot-swap connector assembly on top (right). You can also see the cage's half of the fan contact system.

Finally we have the parts box. There are two baggies of small parts. One is mainly for mounting drives, and the other is for motherboard mounting and miscellaneous screws and parts. There are also the 3.5" drive rails for an external drive like a floppy or other external 3.5" bay device, and the users' guide. Here, again, the screws that were supplied that could possibly be used for mounting drives (as your situation might require) are too long for safe use with all drives, so either obtain proper length screws (less than 3/16" of thread) after checking your mounting hole depths, or shim them out with washers.

After looking all around inside the case and in the parts box, I could find no case speaker. I really missed those reassuring "everything's OK" beep/boops that I've heard for 20+ years.

Unique Features

Now I'll study the Silverstone "value added" to this OEM steel chassis which the sharp reader will have noted under other brand names. The bezel of the KL01 is largely made of 3mm aluminum extrusions. There are two parts to it: the base which holds the bay dress plates as well as the front panel wiring, switches and the ports (FireWire, 2x USB, and audio jacks), and the door. This assembly weighs 3.75 of the case's 18.7 pound net weight. The door is reversible simply by moving the hinge pins to the other side - just press on the pad in the middle of the pins and the hinge pins slide right out (don't lose the spring for the top hinge). Or removable by simply pressing down the top hinge against the spring (kind of like a watch-strap pin) and setting the door aside - the case looks just fine without the door but is significantly quieter with it. The heavy aluminum pieces have a finely brushed, anodized finish both inside and out. A few minor plastic pieces and a bit more mesh in the corners round out the bezel. The name plate is cut into the aluminum and given a contrasting finish to the majority with the letters raised and their tops given a bright polish job in the Silverstone tradition.

The next Silverstone original is the HDD cage. As far as I know, this cage is unique to this series of cases, though Silverstone would be wise to consider packaging them for separate sale. It is mostly made of steel sheet with a simple zinc chromate finish. The design allows the cage to be assembled properly in either of two ways which reduces assembly line errors and increases final quality. It holds up to four HDDs, each in its own plastic, slide-in carrier. If you are familiar with the server-grade hot-swap drive cages, then you have the idea, except those typically cost as much as this entire case and have fancier carriers.

These carriers can hold any type of 3.5"x1" standard desktop drive except perhaps for those that require a connector adapter like SCA (80-pin) SCSI drives. I tested a SCA drive and it fits, but you will have to either put the adapter on after the drive is in the cage or remove the drive or carrier in the position above it as one of the carrier cross-braces catches on the adapter. The four, normally used drive mounting holes in the carriers come equipped with elastomer bushings and matching shouldered screws which should be able to handle whatever minimal vibration a recent drive would dish out.

Also included is a hot-swap connector bracket (CP05) for one SATA drive (either 150 or 300 speed). This clever device can be mounted at any drive position to let you make one of your drives readily removable. This is called the CP05 Hot-Swap Connector bracket - extras will be at the resellers soon for ~$5.00 each. I have another stacker-type case here, and I would buy one of these cages for it were they available separately (just pounding the point home).

To complete the package, Silverstone designed a wireless contact set for the fan holder that is provided to cool the drives in the cage, so you can take the fan holder out from the front without having to deal with wires. The fan holder has a similarly excellent fan cutout on its intake side as the back panel has on the exhaust side of the fan, but that plus was negated by covering the fan holder with the same fine mesh that covers all the bay dress plates. The mesh cuts fan speed significantly but does act as a de facto filter and nearly immediately collects a skin of dust in my old, leaky house. Luckily the mesh can easily be removed from the fan holder with a thin-bladed knife. Once again SST's fondness for form over function rears its head.

I would also like to have seen the fan holder given the ability to handle 38mm thick fans and a real fan filter - you will be modding the thing if you need more than a 25mm fan can deliver, plus you will likely lose the fancy contact system. The issue is not hard to work around, but it would be unnecessary if a little more thought had been given to functional design. In any case, a 38mm fan probably won't be desired except by those of us who prefer a positive pressure cooling system in their cases to keep the dust out.

Build Out

The task now is to move my system from its current case into this Kublai. As I go through the component installation, I will note things that can be done to improve the final result while entailing little or no extra cost. Barring any obstruction problems, I like to install the PSU first, which entails opening the left side door (in this instance I already had everything off the case that would come off, short of the top panel which is removable too), and here you come to the first demerit on this case: no thumbscrews on the left or right side panels. I can see perhaps leaving off the right side thumbscrews, but not on a case in this price bracket - even the cheapest case should have them for the left side. I like to mount my PSUs with thumbscrews too - luckily I have a small supply of them here.

When you install the PSU first, the case should be connected to ground through it. I immediately check to make sure the PSU's power switch is in the OFF position (and set at the correct voltage, if necessary) and plug the PSU in to the wall outlet to complete the ground path - if the PSU lacks a power switch, I use a 3-wire extension cord and plug just the ground pin from the PSU into it. This step makes it safer while handling and installing the static-sensitive components. I touch the chassis with one hand or the other frequently to keep my charge neutralized.

This case has so many drive location options that it can be difficult to choose the arrangement you want. I would suggest just putting them in and sorting out the errors later - better than delaying starting at all. Anyway, I temporarily installed a few drives (the longest and shortest) just to see the likely interference points with my motherboard, which is installed second. I decided that my longest device (a mobile drive rack) should go at the top and then proceed downward in order of decreasing length (mostly).

The I/O port shield went in easily, and the common standoffs went in next, which brings me to the second demerit - skimpy counts on the hardware pieces. There were exactly the needed amount of the unusual parts: standoffs, hard drive mounting screws for the cage, self-tapping screws for plastic items. No allowance for losing any parts or for atypical installations. Again, this shouldn't be necessary in this price bracket.

There were enough standoffs for my motherboard and I added an old, plastic standoff for extra support at one corner (the standoff had to be modded a bit). I like to have as much support for the motherboard as possible - especially around the card and memory sockets, so I will add more plastic standoffs if I think they are needed and there are places to fit them.

All the components went in easily and lined up properly. It is suggested to preinstall the CPU with its heatsink and the memory modules - installing them after the motherboard is in the case can be clumsy with most mid-tower size cases.

What about the monstrous 8800GTX video cards, you ask? Well, you have under 10" of card space to the back edges of the hard drive cage and just under 11" to the back edge of the 5" drive rack side, so you can arrange things to fit in a long card or two. There are no quick-release (toolless) card locks, so double-wide cards, etc. are no problem. I have read elsewhere that long cards will fit as long as you can relocate any drives with the hot-swap connection out of its way in the cage.

The Hot-Swap SATA connector adapter overhangs the motherboard a bit, so you may have to rearrange things if you wish to use one or more of those. Here we find the third demerit: if, for some reason, you need to move the hard drive cage out of its bottom location, the holes for the #6 screws that would fasten the toolless drive mounting rigs for optical drives onto the three bottom bays (so you could move them there if you wanted) are not threaded, so you will have to take care of that yourself. Cheap tap sets for the smaller numeric sizes (like 4, 6 and 8) are available at most well-stocked hardware stores. On the other hand, you could just use normal screws to mount any drives down there - no tapping needed for that. I can't imagine there was much savings from not having those four holes on each side tapped (the very bottom bay doesn't even have the holes). Still, the flexibility of drive mounting is the key feature of stacker style cases.

Most optical drives mounted in the toolless devices will work just fine but can feel a little loose when the bezel is off. If you don't like that, it is easy enough to tack the drives down with a screw on one or both sides, but when the front bezel is attached to the case, the drives won't be able to move much even without screws.

The pins on left side toolless devices may be too long for some drives as they kept the tray on my Plextor PX-712 from retracting fully so it would cycle back out instead of staying in - if your optical drive acts like that, use shorter screws on them. You can limit how far the pins go into the drives by slipping a couple of washers onto them as needed. I suppose SST didn't get the message regarding keeping drive mounting hardware to a minimum length.

Fitting a 3.5" external device into the opening provided in one of the bay dress plates can be a tight squeeze as allowance wasn't made in the measurements for the mesh's being folded into the opening. If it fits too tightly for you, any 3.5" external bay adapter that fits in a 5" bay can be used instead. I'm sure Silvrstone would like you to consider its FP51 aluminum bay adapter bracket, though it is perhaps a bit of overkill for a case at this price level.

Final Assembly

You see the front of the finished KL01 system. My hodge-podge of bay devices are present in all their glory (from top down): mobile rack normally holding an LS-120 SuperDisk drive, Plextor burner, CM Aerogate fan controller / temp. monitor, YE Data floppy drive/flash card reader combo, and Samsung burner.

Above shows how the bay device lengths can impinge on the motherboard and cards. The Abit motherboard is a standard sized unit, though more compact ones shorter in front to back length are available due to more integration of chipsets.

Thermal and Noise Performance

With the front and side doors in place and the mesh in place on the front fan, my temperatures were running a few degrees higher than the same system in my regular case, a Rosewill/Yeong Yang 5604. In particular, the hard drives were running 5 to 6 degrees higher. Open the front door and the temps went down a bit while the audible noise rose a bit. Remove the mesh from the front fan, and its RPMs rose a bit, but the hard drives were happily back in their normal range. With all doors, panels and mesh in place, my CPU and rear fans also dropped some RPMs. So at least in my situation, if I had left the slot cover plates and other rear vent holes open, air would have been drawn in through them to make up for the restrictions on the front fan. It also means that the mesh is quite restrictive.

Still, I am fairly sure that wasn't the intended flow pattern. I suspect the plastic toe behind the bottom of the front door could be partially cut away to provide better intake. As it is, the only unobstructed air available when the door is closed is coming in thru the small openings at the outside corners of the toe piece.

The OEM fans have a whine to them which isn't bothersome to me and is largely blocked (along with drive and other fan noise) when the front door is closed. It is claimed that they put out over 60CFM at only 1200RPM. I doubt it, but they are capable of cooling my system with the easy modifications I mentioned.

It is fairly obvious that noise can escape the mesh, while air flow is somewhat blocked by it. These fans also still have "unbalanced weight" (labels) on the hubs of their blades, which I have pointed out to SST before. I was easily able to detect the "label effect" on one, but it was barely noticeable on the other. I removed them both per my policy, and you can see them stuck into the bottom of the case in some of the pictures.

Conclusion

The Kublai SST-KL01 is a very nice case with well above average aesthetics, and it is hard to beat Silverstone on that point. The drive mounting flexibility is adequate to work around most potential mechanical conflicts, {plus there is good cable management potential. Cooling potential is great, and it is not difficult to work around the appearance-driven (form vs function, as mentioned) limitations that came with it as standard equipment.

Many of the cons will affect some more than others and are relatively minor, but I would be remiss in not pointing them out. There is also the unique HDD cage, which I could see SST selling for up to $29.95 separately. I could also see Silverstone making the HDD cage an option to have a model in the line at an even lower price point. Up to four extra pairs of bay adapter brackets could be provided for HDD mounting - don't forget the extra self-threading screws for them.

I can recommend the Kublai SST-KL01 especially for those who need the drive/device mounting flexibility without the bulk of the full-tower, stacker-type cases. Accordingly, I am giving the Kublai SST-KL01 an overall score of 8.5 of 10.

Pros:

Nice conservative appearance with just a touch of bling
Quiet with the heavy aluminum door closed
Impressive hot-swap drive cage
Flexible drive positioning and all bays are easily accessed from the front

Cons:

Most mid-tower stacker type cases need more depth
No thumbscrews for left side panel
Some improper length screws
Lack of swing-out legs for improved stability
Made choices of form over function

Overall Rating: 8.5/10 (higher is better)

Product Info:

Silverstone Technologies
Street Price: $112-$135 + s/h

Thanks goes to Tony at Silverstone for facilitating this review sample. Original text and photos (c) W.A. (Bill) Hill, Groton, NY Sept. 2007. Used on TechIMO.com by author's consent.