Be Quiet! Dark Base Pro 900 Review

Performance Analysis

Something that was fairly clear is that the 1,000 RPM SilentWings 3 fans included with the Pro 900 are extremely quiet - in fact they were inaudible with the rest of the hardware running, but they also dished out fairly low airflow. As a result, there was actually no difference between having the hard disk cage in place and removing it, although the mounts themselves do have large vents, which might also explain this.

The CPU delta T wasn't going to be chart topping with this kind of low airflow setup, but a max speed result of 56°C was reasonable, sitting in the middle of the graphs. Dropping the fans down to 5V saw this rise to 59°C, which is still acceptable, and the fans were quieter still - silent, in fact, unless you put your ear right next to them.


While removing the hard disk mounts made no detectable difference in temperatures with our test gear, something that did was switching to the inverted ATX configuration. With the CPU now sitting in line with the front fans and in the cooler air at the base of the case, the delta T dropped by 3°C. It also dropped the GPU delta T a single degree as well, so if there are no other reasons for you personally to consider dangling your hardware upside down, the cooling results show an improvement, albeit a small one.

Conclusion

The Dark Base Pro 900 touches on practically every conceivable topic we'd normally discuss in a conclusion with a premium case, and this can make for a tricky decision both in terms of a recommendation and for the end user. It's expensive enough to compete with some seriously good cases. In Win's epic 909 is only £60 or so more and the 904 is £70 less. Lian Li has some very attractive and all-aluminium cases for the same price, and Phanteks makes one of the best £200 cases around in the Enthoo Primo.

Then, of course, you can also think about some of the more niche cases such as the new ATX offerings from Parvum Systems and Hex Gear. However, while some of these cases beat the Pro 900 in terms of material quality and unique aesthetics and may make it easier to build a tidy system, none have the flexibility the Pro 900 offers and few can match its water-cooling credentials either. It's at home with practically any ATX system - want to use five hard disks and a bunch of SSDs? No problem. Want to strip everything out and build a mammoth twin 420mm radiator liquid cooled behemoth - yep, it can do that too. Want to shift the motherboard around to cater for an E-ATX motherboards and multiple GPUs? Box ticked. Want a case that you can spend hours tinkering with? That too.

One of our main concerns with the Pro 900 was whether there would actually be a benefit from all the swapping and changing. However, both in terms of cooling and what you can fit inside, Be Quiet! has shown that this is not only possible without costing a fortune due to design costs, but does result in benefits depending on your setup too. Thankfully the Pro 900 also looks fantastic and has one of the best feature sets we've seen in a case as well. It's certainly overkill if you're not a storage fiend or water-cooling your system and even then there are cheaper alternatives, but Be Quiet! has come on in leaps and bounds since its first case - the Silent Base 800. We can thoroughly recommend the Dark Base Pro 900 if you have the cash, and can't wait to see if Be Quiet! applies the concept to smaller, cheaper cases too.