MonsterLabo The First Review – Not Quite Silent

1. Introducing MonsterLabo The First2. Getting Inside The First3. Cooling Performance4. Closing Thoughts5. View All Pages

We are impressed by the heart of The First which is an enormous heatsink with two cold plates for the CPU and GPU and two sets of six heatpipes. Preparing your motherboard/CPU/RAM and graphics card and installing them on the cold plates is fairly straightforward. Adding the other pieces of hardware that connect the system together, and which turn it into a functioning PC such as the struts/studs and pass through cables, requires more work and thought.

Once you have finished building The First and it is running, you will doubtless be happy that your new PC is either silent or very quiet. The likely problems lie in the details. For example, you may well lose out on a full set of USB ports on the I/O panel, and you may not be able to connect multiple monitors, depending on the passthroughs that you choose to employ. Many motherboards come with Wi-Fi on the I/O panel and we cannot see how you would use this feature in The First as there seems to be no space for the antennae.

If you want to drastically reduce how much noise your PC makes, then The First is likely to be of interest, and you can still build a competent gaming PC inside it – we saw RTX 2070 and Ryzen 7 2700 running without problems. That said, it is the little details which hold it back, meaning it's worth a look if you really want a very quiet/silent PC – but if you can live with a little bit of fan noise, there are better (and cheaper) options out there.

You can buy MonsterLabo The First Premium for €369/429 (depending if you want the Basic or Premium package) at the MonsterLabo store HERE.

Pros:

• The system is effectively silent and can be made truly silent.
• Cooling performance is impressive.
• Compact footprint.

Cons:

• There is no user guide or manual.
• I/O is handled by passthroughs that may limit the number of I/O ports.
• Hardware compatibility is a key factor – refer to MonsterLabo’s compatibility lists.
• PCI Express riser cable is required so the Premium package is pretty much mandatory.

KitGuru says: It takes a lot of work to make a PC truly passive and silent.

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