BeQuiet! Dark Base Pro 900 Orange rev. 2, Full Tower ATX, 3 pre-installed Silent Wings 3 fans, tempered glass window, RGB LED illumination BGW14

Product Information

Completely sound insulated case with decoupled elements for motherboard tray, power supply and drives Our thanks to AMD, Gigabyte, G.Skill, Nvidia, and Corsair for helping to outfit our test systems with some of the finest hardware available. Our thanks as well to be quiet! for providing the Dark Base Pro 900 rev. 2 for review, as well. As with any case, this Dark Base 900 is not perfect. The manual is quite intricate, with instructions on doing lots of things. But the online version could be a little more detailed than our paper version. Also, I would like to have seen included spares of their unique fasteners. And there is the possibility a user might want to use top-down air-cooling. As the case is constructed the user would not have a dust filter in with that specific configuration. But overall the design was well thought out and can accommodate about any system you want to build. The be quiet! engineers continue to use fake filters in the side panel. Such a “filter” is uncalled-for in a high-end case like this one. But the designers should be given kudos for not including front and top “grills” where they were absolutely not needed. Wireless charging, a key feature for the Dark Base Pro range, remains present with a good-sized Qi pad positioned at the front of the top panel. It works just as you’d expect, but charging capacity has been bumped up from 5W on the original 900 to 15W on the 901. Nice.

Given the largely screw-free approach, we’re surprised be quiet! hasn’t opted for a more user-friendly side panel mechanism. As it stands, the heavy tempered-glass panel is notched at eight points and has to be perfectly aligned before being slid into position and secured by captive thumbscrews. Far from a deal breaker, but in our experience, such notches can bend over time. On panels as big and heavy as this, we’d prefer a swing-to-open hinge.The rubberized fan frame is equipped with funnel-shaped air inlets producing extremely high air pressure This MB tray has cushions. How come? The motherboard tray does not touch the side. Hmm, A mystery. But the MB tray seems to be fastened to the case skeleton with sound-deadened screws, also visible here. If this default configuration doesn’t suit your needs, the Dark Base Pro 900’s motherboard tray and hard-drive cage can be removed from the case entirely and flipped to create an inverted interior layout, again with three different spots between the top and bottom-most mounting points. be quiet! also says you can use the tray as a test bench if need be, but more elegant options exist if you’re running such a bench full-time and not just as a trial run to ensure your new build is functioning. Given the complexity this design entails, it’s definitely worth opening up be quiet!’s lengthy manual and figuring out the full range of the Dark Base 900’s capabilities before embarking on a build. The next picture up shows the exhaust fan, the heatsink widow in the motherboard tray, the upper end of the removable HDD containers, the 5.25” ODD bay and the two front fans again. There doesn’t look to be provision for an E-ATX motherboard here. On the far right, you can see the tabs the holding the front tray to the case skeleton.

In addition to adjusting the height of the motherboard tray, you can take it out, flip it around, and install it on the other side of the case. This results in an inverted orientation that allows you to show off your build from the right side instead of the left. be quiet!’s Dark Base Pro 900 rev. 2 case intimidated me a bit at first with its massive size and huge array of potential interior arrangements. I never imagined that I might need the case’s adjustable motherboard tray, for example, but it proved a lifesaver when I attempted and failed to mount our test system’s 360-mm liquid CPU cooler on my first attempt. the beauty of a full-tower enclosure as flexible as this is you get to try every possible permutation. Another standout feature of the Dark Base Pro 900 rev. 2 is its integrated fan and lighting hub. This hub can distribute a PWM fan signal from the motherboard to as many as eight connected fans, and switches on the controller can gear down those PWM signals to create separate low-speed and high-speed groups of four fan headers each. Like I noted earlier, the hub can also take a signal from the now-ubiquitous four-pin RGB LED headers on most motherboards and distribute it to the Dark Base Pro 900’s included pair of hard RGB LED strips or to lights connected to another four-pin RGB LED header on the hub itself.

A Closer Look: Configuring the Case

Another significant upgrade over Dark Base Pro 900 is that vertical GPU installation is now officially supported. be quiet!’s eight expansion slots can be rotated by unfastening the screws on the retaining assembly, but there are a couple of provisos to be aware of. The expansion slots must be rotated before installing the motherboard – we found this out the hard way! – and when in vertical configuration, the thumb screws holding each slot in place are more difficult to reach on account of the rear fan. A closeup of the PSU part of the rear we can see two grilled one-inch spacers above the PSU grill. Presumably, a PSU would sit with it bottom portion submerged in the case’s framework. From this we can guess that for a PSU to breath freely it must sit forward of the grillwork of the case. Note the vents at the bottom. These presumably contribute to the PSU’s air intake. PSU Grill

Anyone who has experience building PCs will find the Dark Base Pro 900 mostly easy to work with. While we experienced a couple of minor speed bumps piecing together our test configuration, we didn't hit any major potholes in the road that might otherwise have us cursing the case. Personally, I have built in over 30+ cases over my time as a PC builder and to date, I have never worked with a case as configurable or flexible as the Dark Base Pro 900 rev. 2. In the end, I was able to create an incredibly clean build and thanks to the modularity of the case, I was even able to change its configuration to completely invert it. I’ve wanted to do an inverted build for quite some time and I could not be happier with the result In the Dark Base Pro. Another dust filter can be pulled from the bottom of the case, but unless you install fans down there, it's not likely to accumulate much grime. At the front of the case, we see the two installed Silent Wing 3 140mm high-speed fans which have a maximum operating speed of 1600 RPM. Even at max speed, the noise level is quite low at 28.1 dB, which is lowered even further with the sound damping material on the front door. Moving on to the build itself, working in the Dark Base Pro 900 was a lot of fun but it did require a lot of time and planning. Because the case is so customizable, you first must plan out what configuration you would like to go with before even installing any components. If you don’t do this, you would find yourself installing/uninstalling your components as you readjust the case. Aside from taking longer than expected to complete, the only issue I ran into during the build was working with cables at the top of the motherboard. Since the motherboard is closer to the PSU shroud when inverted, it was a little bit of work trying to plug in some things like the EPS and CPU cooler fan cables.

A Closer Look: Exterior

As you can see, even the non-Pro version of this case is expensive; but both versions earn their keep. They are fine cases that can accommodate the best heatsinks and didn’t forget about water cooling. The glass side and the LED’s show off your system to perfection. The front panel has a brushed-aluminum door that swings open. It has an insatiable appetite for finger smudges too, so be prepared to wipe it down every so often. Like the right-side panel, there is sound-dampening material attached to the inside. Behind it are a pair of 140mm PWM intake fans that come with the case. These are protected by an easily removable dust filter. Thinking outside the box, Be Quiet built a Qi charging station into the Dark Base Pro 900. It sits on top of the case toward the front. This allows you to plop a Qi-enabled smartphone (such as the Samsung Galaxy S8 or LG G6) on top of the case to recharge while you frag your friends. That's pretty rad. It can also free up a USB port if you often find yourself charging your phone through your PC. The face panel is what we expect from Scandinavia and Germany – sleek, almost plain-looking but smooth and attractive. At the top, we can see the I/O cluster showing again its accessibility from the front. You can also see the tape holding the door shut.