Operating Volume & Temperatures
To ensure accurate thermal results, we installed the same hardware in each case in virtually the same way. Components included the Asrock Fatal1ty 990FX Professional, Phenom II X6 1100T, Prolimatech Megahalems in passive mode (i.e. no fan actively dispelling heat), Inno3D GeForce GTX 580 OC, half a dozen Western Digital Scorpio Blue 500GB hard drives, and OCZ's ZX 1000w power supply.
The Cooler Master Silencio 650 was extremely quiet with its three case fans on their lowest setting, while spinning them up from 700RPM to 1200RPM only increased the noise level by 2dB. When running FurMark, which caused the GTX 580 to spin up, just 35dB of noise escaped from the case.
With the fans at 1200RPM, we were disappointed in the Silencio's idle cooling results as the processor hit 53 degrees, only five degrees off from being the worst performance we've recorded here.
Interestingly, the Silencio didn't perform nearly as poorly when under load, with similar a processor temp as the Corsair Obsidian 650D, though the GPU and HDD temps were higher.