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

Once the build was complete, I really loved how clean it looked thanks to rubber grommets and cutouts around the motherboard tray. The included RGB LED bars (which I installed on the left side and top of the case) do an excellent job of illuminating my components and overall, I really love how unique the build looks with its inverted configuration. One thing to note is that even though the finish of the Dark Base Pro looks beautiful, it is a fingerprint magnet. It’s not a huge issue but you just have to make sure you have a microfiber cloth on standby so you can have your build look its best. 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.

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. 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. Every contribution makes a difference and we thank you for your support. Inside the Belly of the Beast Jumping ahead to an open case, we can see the bottom filter pulled out to its whole length. You can see the meshed-over side inlets for bottom intake fans. If you will recall, the bottom surface is blank. That means you can put this case on a carpet with impunity: it will not plug up your airflow. The length and accessibility of the bottom filter is also important. This case weighs 29 to 32 lbs without computer gear inside (the variation: it weighs 29 lbs. with one HDD cage, 32 lbs. with seven). It makes sense that once you put it down you will not want to move the case with its enclosed system. Having the bottom filter cover the whole bottom of the PSU to the front means that once you put it down you won’t have to move it. The filter is accessible from the front without moving the case which allows you to put the case in a cabinet. The motherboard tray supports a wide range of motherboard sizes that including small form factor boards like Mini-ITX/M-ATX all the way up larger once such as E-ATX/XL-ATX. The Dark Base Pro also has plenty of cable routing cutout around the motherboard with two at the top and bottom as well as three grommets on the right side of the tray.

Final Thoughts & Conclusion

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. 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. We started things off by installing an Asus AM1I-A mini-ATX motherboard and plugging in the various I/O cables. This was easy, as we had several cable-routing options available to us. We also appreciate that the case includes some pre-installed standoffs.

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. The front of the Dark Base Pro 900 consists of a solid brushed aluminum hinged door with a silver be quiet! emblem at the bottom. 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. I raised the temperature (but not power) limits on our GeForce GTX 1080 Tis to the maximum of 90° C to prevent thermal limits from artificially capping the temperature our graphics cards could reach in our testing.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. 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! 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. This post is more a public service for other AF 420 AIO owners, wondering if your rad will fit a Dark Base Pro 900 rev.2 Here you can see those grommets in action, holding the front fans while dampening vibrations. Slots allow those fans to slide up and down or allow you to put a rad here. You can also see narrower slots for 120 mm fans.

The included fan controller can have a total of 8 fans attached to it being split up into 2 channels of 4 fans. Each of the channels can be set independently into silence or performance mode using the front panel switch. The controller also contains connections for up to two 12v LED strips and can be synced with your motherboard using the RGB header or controlled using the LED switch on the I/O panel. 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 beauty of a full-tower enclosure as flexible as this is you get to try every possible permutation. Mounting our test system’s motherboard, graphics cards, and storage proved simple enough. I didn’t realize that the motherboard tray’s default position afforded radiators on the top mount of the case just 40 mm of clearance, so I immediately ran into issues when I attempted to install the Thermaltake Water 3.0 Ultimate 360-mm liquid cooler we use with our Ryzen Threadrippers. The radiator ran straight into our test motherboard’s VRM heatsink. After some head-scratching, I decided to give the Dark Base’s adjustable motherboard tray a shot—even with a fully-assembled and fully-cabled system installed already.