Design by be quiet!

Whether it's a PC case, a power supply unit, fan, or cooler. All of our products are in-house developments. We ensure that no be quiet! product may be sold under any other brand. During product development, design and functionality are equally important to us.

To meet our high standards, our teams at the headquarter in Germany are in constant exchange with the departments in Asia and the factories located there to control the entire product development process from the first draft to mass production. Future-proofing is a sensitive issue here. Especially the developments in the performance requirements of high-end components in recent years pose special challenges for the development of PC cases.

The big question here is, what can be defined as requirements during product development when the exact specifications of coming hardware generations are still written in the stars?

An innovative measuring device for our product development

Our product development department had a complex measuring device built to be able to realistically simulate high permanent system loads without having to equip the system with real hardware. For the setup, the PC case currently under development (in the pictures we show a Dark Base 900 Rev.2) is equipped with dummy hardware; only the cooling fans are real products. The highlight is that metal plates are installed in the models and the same places as real products.

The various dummy components can now be continuously supplied with power through connections to a high-performance power supply unit. As a result, the metal plates heat up just as real hardware components would, and the installed cooling products must now dissipate this heat. Utilizing 16 freely positionable measuring sensors and comprehensive software, the results can be read out and examined very precisely. The airflow design can then be adjusted and improved for the next test run.

The immense advantage over a static test setup with real hardware can be easily deduced. Neither do various test samples of a PC case have to be produced for testing with different hardware nor do constant system changes and conversions of a single sample have to be made.

While a current high-end system can only be configured to a limited extent, our setup can be used to simulate any existing or future combinations of hardware, and parameters such as fan speeds and power consumption can be set completely freely. Possible questions that can be easily investigated in this way are, for example:

• How does the temperature behave at specific points such as the MOSFETS if the GPU requires 600W of power permanently and only two case fans have been installed?
• Is the positioning of the front fans optimal, or are there hot spots below the graphics card?
• How long does it take for the temperature in the case to cool down after a 30-minute load?
• What speed is appropriate for the case fans in a mid-range system?
• Can the high-end system of the future, which can only be imagined today, still be kept cool efficiently with a continuous load of 900W?

In short, any combination of different scenarios can be simulated for any length of time with just one test setup. There is only one restriction: a maximum permanent system load of 2000 watts. This is not a scenario for the next 10 years from today's perspective.