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

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. 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. Removable anti-vibration mountings minimize the transmission of vibrations to the PC case and its components

In its most basic form, the Dark Base Pro 900 is a very large case with ample space for even the most bloated builds. If you want to shove an Extended-ATX motherboard inside and flank it with more than a dozen storage drives, you can. However, what is most intriguing about the Dark Base Pro 900 is the level of customization it affords. The screws that hold the motherboard tray in place are outfitted with orange rubber grommets. To lower the motherboard tray, you also must remove one or two mesh covers at the bottom rear of the case. You can then install one or both up top in the gap that is created by dropping the motherboard tray down one or two positions. It's a simple and clever design. Completely sound insulated case with decoupled elements for motherboard tray, power supply and drivesWith 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. The front panel of the case can accept up to four 120-mm fans or radiators as large as 280 mm or 420 mm depending on the builder’s preferred fan size. A stepless slider behind the front door controls as many as eight PWM fans off the included fan controller. Sliding this control all the way to the left lets the hub accept PWM signals from a motherboard fan header, too.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. Speaking of HD containers let’s look at one with an HD in it. Those slots should provide adequate ventilation. The next picture shows an SSD in a 3.5” cage, thus confirming the boast that you could put 15 SSD’s in this beast (seven 3.5” cages and one 2.5” carrier). 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. 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