A Closer Look -Inside

Before we dive into the interior of the be quiet! Pure Base 501 DX, there is the solid panel that is also lined with sound-dampening material to keep things as quiet as possible.


The interior of the chassis is set up quite traditionally, including the shroud on the bottom. It has been simplified a little bit compared to its predecessor, as it is now completely solid. This makes sense, as the Pure Base 501 DX now allows for vertical GPU placement and thus has no room for fans here in turn. It also has a larger cutout in the front for you to easily install a 360 mm radiator here by moving the HDD cage back a bit. On the backside of the chassis, you will find four pre-installed Velcro strips to complement the five in the accessories box.


The Pure Base 501 DX continues to provide a mounting plate for two 2.5" drives with the branded cover at the center, which hides away the cables connecting to the drives. This metal piece also acts as a cable cover for the motherboard and has been redesigned to make wiring thick ATX wiring a bit easier. A bracket allows for two more SSDs to be mounted to the CPU cooler opening.


In the front, below the shroud, is an HDD cage for either two 3.5" drivers or one 3.5" and one 2.5" drive. This means that the be quiet! Pure Base 501 DX can hold a solid total of six storage units. It is held in place by two thumb screws and may be moved back by about an inch for a thin 360 mm radiator without having to sacrifice this storage element. However, for a thicker variant, the cage needs to be removed completely. Above that area is the aforementioned mounting frame for three 120 mm, two 140 mm fans, or a 360 mm radiator.


The PSU bay in the bottom of the rear is equipped with four foam patches as an anti-vibration measure. Above that are the seven expansion slots with externally accessible thumb screws. Thanks to the additional flexibility, these are now also bridgeless. In the very top, you can clearly see the pre-installed 140 mm exhaust fan.


Setting the expansion slots up vertically isn't quite as easy as some other implementations out there, but it does work well. be quiet! clearly had to get creative to offer this feature while keeping the tooling changes to the back metal of the frame as small as possible. The solution consisting of the three extra pieces means you have to remove all seven expansion slots, install two into the opening to allow for the existing covers to be secured vertically. Lastly, a small, be quiet! branded cover is placed across the top to close off any openings.


Looking at the ceiling, you can see that the mounting holes are as far away from the motherboard as possible, so you should have no issues with cooling colliding with your motherboard.


All the cables within the be quiet! Pure Base 501 DX are of the default variety and will fit any modern motherboard. The built-in controller is powered by a SATA connector and includes a 3-pin connector to allow for the motherboard control of the built-in lighting. The downside is that the reverse, a way to connect your ARGB elements to the physical case button is not possible. Another small update over the original is the unified motherboard header connector to make that step in the assembly process really easy.