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

Next, we will strip off the bottom, front and top covers off the case. Here we see interior views of those covers. Here a glass-topped scale will do the honors: the covers weigh 2 lbs. 15 oz. (47 oz. = 1.3 kg) on the bottom, 2 lbs. 7 oz. (39 oz. = 1.1 kg) at the front and 2 lbs. 4 oz. (36 oz. = 1 kg) on the top. 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. 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. 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.

So, the question...does the AF LF 420 fit in a Front mount position ? The answer is yes, with some provisos. I have pictures below showing it in position. the beauty of a full-tower enclosure as flexible as this is you get to try every possible permutation. The top panel pops off after we release several plastic tabs from the inside of the case. A look underneath reveals another layer of sound-deadening foam, plus the baffles behind the mesh we saw from the outside of the case. be quiet! claims these baffles help break up direct air flow and smooth out the case’s noise character, but they primarily appear to constrict air flow to my jaded eye. We’ll see whether that impression carries over in our performance tests.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.

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 middle spacer has a kingpin in it to allow for easier motherboard navigation. A case reviewer learns to appreciate those nice little touches. 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. 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.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. 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. 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. 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.