As you can see, here in front of me I have chassis which comes from the SilentiumPC, their Armis AR7X TG RGB model and inside it, at the top, there’s also their 280 mm all-in-one watercooler, the Navis 280 RGB (yes, more RGB). This time I’m jumping right into, I’m trying a new format so to speak, I’m going to show you my building processing of it, just so you can see how the assembly went and after that, we will go thought the chassis features, pros, and cons. Without further ado – let’s build in this.
So, how was it? Well, pretty much as with any other well thought out chassis, the only thing that’s different that you’ll have a lot of fingerprint cleaning to do once you’re done building because there’s a lot of glass. Overall this model brings in that familiar and pretty well-established look which is roaming through the chassis industry for some time, bottom-line they went for that clean and simple design which is dominated by this tinted tempered glass on the left and the front side panels. The left side panel can be easily pulled off in a pretty common manner, by removing four corner thumbscrews, while on the right side we have a classical metal panel held with two thumbscrews on the back. Its design sort of falls into the second plan once everything lights up, before all on a count of those two main sides having see-through panels, so you can see all of the light show in full effect.
Back to the build itself. Inside of the chassis, there’s plenty of space and one thing that pops right out is the fact that we have this vertical mounting bracket for the GPU. Unfortunately, you won’t get a PCI-express extension cable with it also, but at least you have an option to do it. If you want to, you can, of course, remove this holding bracket so it doesn’t spoil the view. As for what you can fit here, length and height wise, you can put up to 420 mm long graphics cards, in here I used the MSI GTX 1660 Super Gaming X, and 178 mm tall air CPU coolers, which is actually above average, and that’s because the Armis AR7X is a 10-30 mm wider than your average ATX mid-tower chassis, with 243 mm in total.
SilentiumPC Armis AR7X – see-through RGB
Around the motherboard tray you will find a total of five cutouts with rubber grommets for easier cable management, and as you can notice, they look to be pretty small, it wasn’t easy to pass a 24-pin ATX power cable through it, but thankfully there’s plenty of them, especially around the right edge of the motherboard, so you won’t have to jam a lot of cables at one cutout. On the right of it, we have this honeycomb mesh style grill onto which you can put up to three SSD drives mounted horizontally and you would probably want to if you have them because those hexagon-like cutouts are pretty large and they’re basically revealing any cables behind them, although the right side-panel blends them in a bit once you put it back on.
On that backside of it you’ll find plenty of mounting points for cable management, they will also provide you with few Velcro ties, which is always appreciated over the zip-ties, although you will get those ones in the bundle too. Overall the cable management was very easy to do thanks to ample of room between the right-side panel and the motherboard tray, although the LED RGB and fan control hub which comes with the chassis, doesn’t make that easy on a count of a bunch of wires that go in and from it. What’s also interesting is that you can put up to three SSD’s drives back, each of them can be mounted onto two holes that go along the edge of the chassis frame, so they’re sort of like dangling in the air.
Speaking of the fans, you’ll get a total of four of them preinstalled with SilenitumPC Armix AR7X, all 120 mm, but unfortunately, they don’t have 4-pin PWM, nor you can only control them via that mentioned hub as it’s not managed by a USB connection, so there’s no software utility for it and now way to customize their speed as you can only control them using a dedicated switch on the front I/O, which has three levels of speed adjustment.
I didn’t use any of the usual 2,5” or 3,5” drives, since having a single NVMe drive on the motherboard for this system, but there’s plenty of for the space in the chassis, besides those spots on the inside which I mentioned, behind the power supply shroud, on the left side you will find drive cage for 2,5” and 3,5”, which have these tool-less trays that split apart so you can put a 3,5” in a matter of seconds. That cage can be completely removed by undoing few screws, and with doing that you will get more room for managing the power supply cables, or you can slide this modular part of the power supply shroud, even remove it completely, if you plan to put a bigger radiator with a push-pull fan configuration on the front, or maybe even mount a reservoir. If you plan to keep it, you can even put an additional 3,5” drive on top of it. On the power supply end, you can install basically any modern power supply model, there’s plenty of room for the cables, even if you want to tuck in some extra, while they put a pretty thick rubber padding for it to sit on. On the other side of that, we have four plastic feet that have soft and grippy padding on them.
Decent airflow for Armis AR7X
In terms of what you can put when to comes to radiators and fan configuration, it’s best described with this picture on their website, bottom line, plenty of possibilities, from 120 mm to up to 360 mm setup choice. Of course, on each of those intake points you will get a dust filter, small ones on the side of the front panel for the intake fans, a big magnet one on the top, and a small one on the back bottom for the power supply.
Moving back to the outside of the chassis, on the top front part of it you can see an array of standard ports and switches, two USB 3.0 ports, audio jacks and power on switch, three-step fan speed switch and an LED toggle switch for different RGB effects. Moving downward along the front glass panel, it doesn’t seem like it can be removed separately, and it can’t, but it rather comes off together with that whole front panel cover, where you can then access those fan filters and the fans itself. You’ve probably noticed that this bottom part of that front panel also mimics the top with this cutout portion, and actually, if you wish to, you can swap the I/O panel so it’s placed on the bottom, which makes it more convenient for users who put their chassis on the table.
Coming down, or up since I placed it on the top, to the all-in-one water cooler itself, the installation of the Navis 280 RGB was as straightforward as it can be. As you’ve seen in the video, the chassis has plenty of room above the motherboards top edge, nothing was in the way, so putting the 280 mm radiator above it wasn’t a problem. The socket bracket goes onto the water block, and you can reuse AMD’s socket backplate from the motherboard, so the only thing you need is a couple of standoffs and screws, and you’re done.
As for the performance, here you can see a few video shots showing CPU’s idle, stock and overclocked temperatures, and I have to say it wasn’t an issue for it to cool of the AMD’s Ryzen 7 3700X. Idle temperature was pretty standard, anywhere between 30 and 35°C, while the load stock temperature didn’t surpass the 80°C mark with the chassis fans speed being at a low setting, which is actually pretty impressive. Overclocking the cores to 4,3 GHz and raising the voltage to 1,394V, the CPU temperature didn’t go above 85°C, just with an occasional spike above it, which is much better to what I saw when I was comparing one of the top Noctua’s and BeQuiet’s air CPU coolers on the market, feel free to watch that later on, I’ll put a link in the right top corner of this video.
Navis 280 RGB – taking the heat off with some style
The SilentiumPC Navis 280 RBG was really quiet at idle, even the pump, and that’s coming from me, as I don’t tend to prefer water coolers in general when it comes to noise, just because it’s hard to avoid those winding, high pitched noise which can pump sometimes have, but this one was really quiet. This is even more impressive since we don’t have any type of control for the pump, as it just powers up over the SATA power connector. Its other connector is for controlling the RGB lighting on it, a standard 12V RGB header. The two 140mm fans that come with it have 4-pin PWM headers, you will get a Y splitter cable that’s nicely braided, so you can connect them onto a single fan header on the motherboard. They also have a 12V RGB header going from them and in case your motherboard doesn’t support it, you will get this handy inline controller for changing their lighting effects and color. They even have split up connections if you want to put them together on a single header. Taking the all-in-one watercooler for a spin, under load we have quite a different story noise-wise, as the fans practically ramp up to their max speed on, which makes it quite loud as you’ll hear later on.
You can hear that the air was moving in the chassis, it has 5 fans working at all time after all, but it wasn’t being loud in a way that I could say it bothered me, even at the higher fan speed settings of the chassis, but on the other hands as I said, the all in one watercooler was pretty loud under load, and this is something you should manually adjust through the motherboards BIOS, since like this they ramp up pretty aggressively and probably a bit too high that they need to, as the motherboard doesn’t know what exactly cooler is on it, so its default settings are probably not optimal for this setup, and I’m sure with tweaking the fan curve by yourself, you can still achieve good results, but with much lower noise floor. Here’s a short sound clip of the whole chassis, how it sounds in few different load scenarios, and fans speed, I will mark them all up so you can know which one is which, while also showing the sound meter for measurement comparison.
Taking all into consideration, from features, design, and overall build quality, which is decent, on par with others in this segment, there’s nothing really major to complain about. As for the all in one watercooler, the same can be said for it, a really well-rounded model, which before all brings in a very good value when it comes a price to performance ratio, it’s hard to beat it for around 60€. You see I’m mentioning euros, and that’s because they’re both not that available, if at all, outside of Europe, which doesn’t go them in favor as they will have an even harder time dealing with their main rivals, especially since the Armis AR7X RGB has a price of around 100€, which puts him in the territory of a rather competitive segment. Nevertheless, competition is always a good thing, it drives the market and brands further, and we, users, always benefit from it in the long run, being it with new cool products like these ones, or lower prices.
The only gripe I have with it is that the LED and fan hub controller doesn’t have any means of controlling the fans over the motherboard, plus the fact that the use of non-standard connections.
That’s it for this time, thanks for checking out my SilentiumPC Armis AR7X TG RGB review and SilentiumPC Navis 280 RGB review, if you have any question feel free to hit me in the comments section of my YouTube video listed above, you can contact me via my social media channels!
