bit-tech Mod: be quiet! build: Part 1

bit-tech Mod: be quiet! build: Part 1

I visited be quiet! just over a year ago, and whilst I was there they showed me a few of their secret projects, with one of the projects being a new case. This ended up being released as the Dark Base Pro 900, and I have had one since launch. Now it is time to finally get to play with it and see what we can do.

The main focus for me on this build will be colour. MSI has joined in with this build and has have supplied a beautiful Titanium motherboard and I want to try and get the case to match the motherboard as much as possible. I also want to add in some orange because.... I like orange. Other than that, I don't want to go too crazy on this build, though I will be making some aluminium covers to ensure everything is cleaner... and I might find some extra bits to do as I go along, but these will happen as the build progresses.

As always, this first post will be introducing the hardware and mentioning any jobs I might need to do with it as work progresses.


First, let's look at the case! As mentioned, I saw the prototype of this a while back and I was actually very impressed with how well be quiet! had progressed in terms of what it wanted to achieve with a range of products. be quiet! is pretty new on the scene when it comes to chassis yet it has produced the Dark Base Pro 900, which has a removable motherboard tray that can be rotated, an integrated wireless charging plate for your Qi-enabled devices and other slightly simpler ideas such as LED and fan controls.

The case is quite large but has a lot of potential, and it has quite a lot of parts that can be removed without any drilling or cutting so it allows us to do a lot with it.


As already mentioned we will be going with MSI for the motherboard and GPUs. MSI kindly sent us the X99A XPOWER GAMING TITANIUM board that, in my opinion, looks beautiful. I really like the colour of this board, and it is rather sleek. I am going to try and find a colour that matches the motherboard and see if it is possible to get the case looking rather silvery.


We decided to go with 2 x MSI GTX 1070 ARMOR 8G OC for the GPUs, which will have water blocks slapped on them. It will be a shame to get rid of the stock cooler as I personally prefer this style of MSI cooler over all the others, but I prefer liquid cooling over everything else. The GPUs have plenty of power for what I need and despite popular opinion, I do actually use all my computers. If I don't friends do when they come round for weekends; we are all gamers/geeks at heart and my computers can get a hammering that the 1070s will lap up.


For RAM and SSDs this time we are going to be using some goodies from HyperX. These are from a previous build, but if possible I try and keep products used rather than sitting on a shelf doing nothing. This RAM has done me well in the past and there isn't much need in changing it. I will probably spruce them up a little as they have a few little war wounds and neither fit the theme of the build. I might actually use some different heatsinks, though we shall see.


We are using the new be quiet! Silent Wings 3 for the fans. We haven't actually tested these so I can't comment on the performance, but if they are anything like the predecessors they will be great. They come in the package with two different mounting options which simply click onto the outside frame of the fan, which I think is rather impressive.

Now, let's check out the liquid cooling....