be quiet! Dark Base 900 PRO review

PC Cases and Modding 228 Page 4 of 10 Published by

teaser

Product Showcase

 

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The front panel, top panel, and side panels are made out of several materials ranging from ABS plastic, to steel for the chassis and aluminum to give it that more luxurious feel. At the front side there is a panel door hiding ODD units, the lower segment has a hatch so you can reach the fans. O
n the right side of the panel you will notice cutouts, they have been embedded for a reason of course, both can be adjusted to allow air to enter the chassis from the sides.
  

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Here I opened up the front side door, the chassis can house up-to two ODD units. A lower face-plate with dust filter can be removed easily as well. You can clean the dust from the filters or access the two 140mm fans quite easily. The inside of the door has nice thick sound dampening material applied to it. It's no surprise to find that the right side panel is lined with a sound-absorbing material as well. The same lining is also included on the front panel, absorbing vibration and noise. You can see the material usage in the above photo. The panel is surrounded by a meshed area, that is the one spot (if it functions as intake) that can hold dust I guess. Well, just use a vacuum cleaner every now and then. 
  

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Let's take a good look at the innards. Everything has been designed in a rather dark fashion. We see grommet holes, lovely with rubber inlays and a lot of covers. A decent design if you ask me. A good and popular trend these days is to make a big gaping hole in the motherboard tray. This actually is a CPU back-plate cutout which allows you to remove and install a new CPU cooler much easier. Typically you'd need to take out the motherboard to install a new cooler, now you can access it from both sides without that unpleasant experience of removing a motherboard from the chassis. To the right you can spot the seven removable HDD trays (you can mount SSDs as well). Cages can be removed to give the chassis a more open feel. That motherboard tray can / may be reversed (flipped) if it is your preference, also that tray can even be taken out and used as test bench. All the way below we can see plenty of space for the PSU and again a cut out to feed PSU cabling through. The PSU area is my one gripe, the PSU is a bit difficult to mount (we'll show you later) but also the cabling becomes very visible. I really would have liked to see a dark black cover there.

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