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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

£49.995£99.99Clearance
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About this deal

Venture inside and it’s like an enthusiast’s playground, with lots of space to explore. Let’s start with fan mounts. There’s the usual 120/140 at the bottom, a 120/140 at the base, three 120s on the side, and three 120s or 140s both up top and in front. No love for 180s, sadly, but if you’re liquid cooling, there’s room for up to a 420mm radiator in front or up to a 360mm in the roof. 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.

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. 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. said:I have a bequiet Silentbase 800 and I am very please with it. However I sth remove the side panel to help cool my R9 390 when needed, and that is with and extra fan on top. This case cooling also seems to be limited to the fans being low static pressure. Altough it is silent, nonetheles. I consider the 900 as a bigger 800 with higher build quality (aluminium) but also a much higher price. I don't know if I would choose it in that price range. 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. 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.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. A power-cable pass-through then joins the PSU’s plug with the outside world. Two smaller mesh panels above this extender can be repositioned to keep the case looking right when the adjustable motherboard tray is moved up or down on its mounts.

Let’s look at the glass side panel. You can’t really call it a windowed side panel; it is more a pane of tempered glass that is used as a side panel. BTW – the object propping up the pane is one of the HDD cages. The glass side panel weighs 5 lbs. 6 oz. (86 oz. = 2.4 kg). Glass Side Panel 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. 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.Now we can see the raw skeleton of the Dark Base 900. It weighs all of 7 lbs. (112 oz. = 3.2 kg). Given that the original case was 29 lbs. making the skeleton out of aluminum would be a false economy. Overall, be quiet’s Dark Base Pro 900 rev. 2 is truly an amazing case and it’s quality/design/flexibly just blew me away. Out of all the cases I have built in, the Dark Base Pro has easily been my favorite and I can’t think of any better case to give the Editor’s Choice award to. As it ships, the slab sits flush with the case to keep noise at bay. You won't find this tidbit in the manual, but if you want added airflow without completely removing the slab, you can pry it partially open. This is an actual feature of the case that should be clearly spelled out in the documentation.

be quiet! touts the flexibility of the Dark Base Pro 900’s interior, and I have to agree that this is one of the most adaptable cases I’ve ever seen. The motherboard tray, rear fan mount, and rear expansion slot panel are all a unit on this case, and they’re joined to its frame by six rubber-dampened screws. The tray can sit in any of three positions on the frame to balance space above the motherboard with room for expansion cards. 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. 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 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. 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.

A Closer Look: Interior

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. 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.

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