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

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. 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. Unlike most PSU shrouds, the Dark Base 900 rev. 2’s isn’t joined up with the motherboard tray in the least. Instead, a generous gap between the tray and the shroud creates a full-length cable routing channel from the bottom of the case into the main chamber. This is one of the better approaches for bridging a dual-chamber case layout that I’ve seen, not least because of its versatility. When your system is pulling 700 W to 800 W from the wall under load, even an 80 Plus Platinum PSU is going to get hot. In fact, I tried both an 80 Plus Gold 1200-W PSU and an 80 Plus Platinum 1000-W PSU in this case to try and keep noise levels down, and they both had to ramp up their fans to howling levels to remain operational in this case. That din led to some troubleshooting on my part, after which I learned opening both of the Dark Base Pro 900’s PSU shroud vents instead of the rear one only seemed to provide enough airflow to the PSU to avoid starving its fan. Set up thusly, the Dark Base Pro 900 proved well-mannered enough to run our usual noise measurements. The Dark Base Pro 900 Rev. 2 looks just as premium as the price suggests. The company utilized a strange set of materials, including ABS plastic, steel, and aluminum throughout, but the end result is quite something. The front panel is actually a door that's held on by two latches and magnets, hiding the front panel dust filter and Silent Wings 3 fans.

Fully versatile thanks to modular construction, offering a relocatable motherboard tray, repositionable HDD slots, support for even E-ATX and XL-ATX as well as the possibility of an inverse layout Even with those minor annoyances, the case provided unmistakable style, excellent cooling performance, pleasant noise levels, and a smooth aural signature, even with a 180-W Ryzen Threadripper CPU and a pair of GeForce GTX 1080 Tis inside. The Dark Base 900’s variety of noise-dampening features didn’t seem to give any of our components any trouble in getting the airflow they needed to stay cool. Overall, the case proved a quiet and competent home for our high-end test system. 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. The last items on the main case that needed to be switched were the orange pads for the motherboard tray.Taking a closer look at the side, we find some mesh ventilation which also follows the glass giving airflow to the top, front and bottom of the case. The case is also big and tall. It measures 23 by 9.7 by 22.7 inches (HWD). That's full-tower territory, though it doesn't loom as large as Corsair's Graphite Series 780T. It is, however, about 7 pounds heavier. This is not a case you will be hauling to LAN parties on a regular basis. Over on the other side is a more traditional metal side door with sound-dampening material glued to the inside. Be Quiet calls this a "2-in-1" side panel because there's a section in the middle that can be removed. Behind that removable slab are two 140mm fan mounts with a dust filter wedged in between. be quiet! Dark Base Pro 900 Orange rev. 2is the perfect case for all who expect the highest standards when it comes to modularity, compatibility, and design.

So like be quiet! felt a need to improve on their flagship chassis, the 'new' Dark Base 900 PRO v2 on the outside looks similar to the one released two years ago - but they applied some tweaks and improvements. Dark, style and feature-rich and obviously silent with the help of noise dampening are just a few features that come to mind. The 900 Pro once again has been fitted with a coated tempered glass, the chassis will offer noise isolation thanks to padded dampening, well that and the use of some faster spinning Pure Wings 3 fans (three of them). As such we review the updated revision 2 quiet! Dark Base 900 Pro. Their case has been overhauled a bit with a new fan controller, new Silent Wings 3 fans, a PSU shroud cover, USB 3.1 Gen 2 support as well as 12V LED strip compatibility. The Pro model still retains that sweet Qi wireless charger for your phone. So yeah, silent fans and improved fan controller and LED support. Have a peek at the product we'll review today. The first step to inverting the Dark Base Pro 900 is pretty much removing all the internals one-by-one. We start the process with completely detaching the motherboard tray from the system by taking out the 9 screws holding it in position. Looking into the case’s main chamber, we can see the other major change be quiet! made to the design of the Dark Base Pro 900 rev. 2 versus its first-gen forebear. A full-length PSU shroud now runs across the bottom of the case for a cleaner look, in keeping with most other cases these days. Plastic covers on top of this shroud can be removed to allow for better air flow to the power supply and storage devices underneath. be quiet! will make this shroud available to those who already own a Dark Base 900 and want to cover up their cable nests. Since our tests today are simply functional rather than competitive, I’ve chosen only to present minimum and maximum temperatures during each of our test phases. For just one example, when I put together our Ryzen Threadripper video-editing build earlier this year, mounting our 360-mm radiator in the top of that case required me to collapse the Fractal Design Define R6’s many 3.5″ bays into just two behind-the-motherboard mounting points. I had to sacrifice its 5.25″ bays in the bargain, as well. During assembly, I also had to re-mount that radiator after our initial configuration to combat a clearance issue I hadn’t accounted for. The biggest, baddest cases around tend to avoid those annoyances, and that’s apparently why they keep selling.

Packaging & Unboxing

Ample scope, and be quiet! gets users off to a solid start with three bundled Silent Wings 4 140mm PWM fans; one rear exhaust and two front intakes. These are high-quality blowers that can hit a top speed of 1,900rpm, generating 78.4cfm airflow while keeping noise level below 30dB. Much better than the bog-standard fans bundled with the majority of chassis on the market, and get this; both the front and top mounts are on removable trays, each of which is outfitted with its own three-way fan hub. It’s this level of attention to detail that enhances the build process. With all those items removed, you now pretty much have an empty shell with the exception of the top panel. Even though it’s not required to remove the top panel, I would highly recommend you do it. I personally didn’t take it off and it was a little bit of a hassle managing the cables while inverting the rest of the components. Now that all the interior components have been adjusted, the last component that needs to be switched is the direction in which the hinged door opens. This can be done by swapping the sides hinge/magnet attachments on the front panel and doing the same process on the door itself. We’ll just unscrew those mounting screws with their sound-deadening grommets. And what do you know? The motherboard comes out. At the bottom of the MB tray, you can see a cable. That leads from a motherboard’s PWM header to that fan controller you saw on the bottom of this tray. But now we know what those cushions were for: they support the MB tray when it sits outside the case. The be quiet! engineers suggest that you can use this tray as a test stand. But why would you buy this huge case just for that? I’ll bet they would sell you the MB tray alone if you ask nicely.

Not every inch of the Dark Base is as well-designed, though. With flexibility comes complexity, and some parts of the case’s design suffer in the name of accommodating the Dark Base’s dizzying array of interior configurations. The power-supply mount on this case doesn’t offer juice boxes nearly enough breathing room, and some might appreciate the option to swap the noise-killing but restrictive front door with a high-airflow mesh panel. Here are the end pieces from the rear or the case. The solid piece comes from above the exhaust fan. The large piece is the PSU carrier face down, showing its bottom screw-holes. What they didn’t include in that picture were the mounting screw grommets. These grommets make those mounting screws work, so it is a good thing be quiet! provided extras. With its fan hub in quiet mode, the Dark Base Pro 900duced a pleasingly smooth noise character under load that belied the pair of GTX 1080 Tis and 180-W CPU cranking away inside. All of the fans I could hear sounded mostly like moving air, and I couldn’t hear a single stray vibration or rattle from the case. The absolute noise levels produced by the system in this configuration were loud enough to be consistently noticeable, but they didn’t annoy me or otherwise cause me to seek aural relief. Seen from the motherboard side the Dark Base 900 looks like it was an inverse ATX case from the start.We also like the integrated Qi charger. Case makers seem to struggle with how best to make use of the top portion of an enclosure. Many of them settle on a compartment to hold your keys and loose change. Others use the space to include a hot-swappable drive bay, and some case makers do nothing at all. Be Quiet recognized that practically everyone owns a smartphone these days, and for those who own a Qi-enabled one, the wireless charging station is a subtle but appreciated amenity. Sorry, iPhone users! 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.

Happily, the adjustable tray functioned perfectly even with a full load of components on board. I only had to support the tray to keep the weight of the system from crushing cabling plugged into the bottom edge of the motherboard while dropping the assembly to its second position. Once the six securing screws were re-installed in the motherboard tray, I was able to install my liquid cooler without a hitch. This kind of flexibility is a lifesaver. In any other case, I would have had to abort my build, find a different cooler, or generally engage in the disassembly of an already-completed system. The Dark Base 900 let me shrug that fitment issue off in just a few minutes, and the time its flexibility let me save made me fall in love with it. 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. Photo 2 is a closer look at photo 1 with a bit more detail, and shows how close the bottom radiator fan is to the shroud. It touches it. The Dark Base Pro 900 is fully modular, meaning every panel and every piece of the case can be torn off, leaving just a skeleton frame. This is both a blessing and a curse. On the positive side, you have a ton of flexibility in how your system is assembled and ultimately looks. However, Be Quiet's approach is to push you into the deep end without a life preserver. It's up to you to either sink or swim, as the manual is the equivalent of a boat anchor. If you’re at the far edges of PC building and never want to consider a single trade-off, ATX full towers remain at the ready. be quiet!’s Dark Base 900 full-tower case family launched over two years ago, but the rev. 2 model we’re looking at now updates the case’s basic formula with several new features to keep up with the latest trends in chassis design. We’ll talk about those in a second, but first, let’s get to know be quiet!’s flagship full tower.The plastic insert on the panel can be totally removed if you are in the need for more ventilation or can be slightly raised providing some airflow while maintaining the case’s silent profile. The rubberized fan frame is equipped with funnel-shaped air inlets producing extremely high air pressure 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. Removable anti-vibration mountings minimize the transmission of vibrations to the PC case and its components