Gadgetory

be quiet has revamped its dark Bass Pro 900 high-end flagship now offering a revision to that for the record largely offers changes we didn't ask for still apparently a lot of people wanted a power supply shroud and some wanted faster fans for this largely silence focused case today we're back with the dark bass pro 900 revision 2 to see how its performance and build have changed since the first revision the new revision is $20 more expensive than the original DBP 900 but we'd expect price will eventually fall closer to the original $250 price point of the dark bass pro 900 case that we reviewed last year before that this video is brought to you by the EVGA CLC 280 liquid cooler people ask me how I keep cool during the summer with all this hair well I've tried a lot of different products and few do exactly what I need many of them cause tangles or worse EVGA CLC 280 helps keep my core temperatures low they're in hot benchmarking sessions the CLC 280 is price competitive and focuses on performance for value offering a 280 liquid cooler at an affordable price get yours at the link in the description below hair mounting kit sold separately this is the dark base Pro 900 rev 2 if you remember the original we actually liked the case overall the dark base pro 900 had excellent build quality it has interesting features not all of them are useful like the Qi charger for instance a lot of people probably don't care about that but if you wanted it it was in the top front of the case still is so it has some interesting features it does things differently it's terribly expensive at $250 but the price wasn't all that unfair for the original dark base pro 900 it's just it's high not unfair but it's high the case overall has always built itself as primarily a silent focused case the name of the company is be quiet X my exclamation point so the name pretty much explains what they're going for with all their cases given that nice exclamation point at the end of the sentence so with the be quiet dark base pro 900 the primary change that we're interested in the one we're testing is the fan speed change they've gone up from a thousand rpm to 1600 rpm quite a significant change in our PM but because the front panel is still ultimately pretty closed off it's hard to say how much that'll matter because you can put the fastest fans in the world in there if they don't have access to a lot of air and they're fighting to pull air in through the sides you're ultimately relying on static pressure the power of the fan when most of it's blocked off and ultimately you will be bottlenecked by that front panel but the question is one of a greater discussion on fan RPMs versus attempting to silence a case it's not thing we've discussed before where they're kind of two ways to achieve silence you either open the whole thing up which of course exposes it to dust as well another fault of the arguments you can open the whole thing up and run lower rpm fans that's gonna be pretty damn quiet because they're running in slower speeds or you close it all off and around higher rpm fans and try and fight the enclosure to bring air in and either way can work it just kind of design depends on the design how well it's been done be quiet designed the dark Bass Pro 900 exceptionally well the foam padding used first of all giant sheet of tempered glass is great for dealing with the low frequency noises low hums and things that noise that fans often make the padding on some of the paneling in the case helps with the higher frequency noise it's like coil wine because the idea is that tiny the sound wave is going to hit the foam break into some pieces bounce around a whole bunch and hopefully not really much of it will escape and get to the end user so they always did well with that but now we're looking at the changes one of the other big changes we'll talk about here is the power supply shroud the major difference in this revision is the addition of a PSU shroud someone asked for this it wasn't us the only mention of a power supply shroud in our original review was to point out that there was enough room for cables elsewhere so it was actually unnecessary to even have a power supply shroud the shroud must be removed in order to install the power supply and the process of replacing it is annoying enough that it's easier just to leave it out however it's optional to install it can be purchased separately to add to the revision one cases if you wanted and it's understandable that be quiet wants to offer as many features as possible in their flagship case that said power supplies roads always pose a bit of a problem potentially for airflow this case is mass enough that it might not matter as much we'll see in the thermal section but we never asked for the PSU shroud as noted there's so much space in the backside that you really almost just don't even need it and you probably have a modular power supply anyway if you're spending almost $300 on the case so not something we cared about but either way it's not harmful to offer more options so there's that let's talk about the LED and the fan controller the functionality here is basically the same as revision one but there are also performance - silent toggles like the controller and the DB 700 it now supports up to 8 fans rather than four LEDs are 12 volts now and can be connected and synched with other standard 4 pin strips and can be controlled via a button on the front panel formerly the reset button fans the fans are still 140 millimeter silent winds threes but they're sixteen hundred rpms rather than 1,000 that has implications as noted for both thermals and noise which will look at momentarily hard drive bay has changed a bit to the original dark bass pro 900 had nine available ports for seven free-floating hard drive baits while the revision 2 has 5 ports for 3 Bay's the lower two ports the upper two since this case is invertible have been converted to fit a 2 drive hard drive cage instead so that the power supply shroud will fit as well and to summarize that's up to three single slot hard drive bays above the shroud and 1/2 slot hard drive cage underneath the shroud USB is changed as with the dark bass 700 be quiet has filled one of their USB 2.0 ports with USB 3.1 instead type C and the other USB 2.0 port has been replaced with a USB quick charge plug panel attachments also a bit different the thumb screws that hold on the glass panel have a weird not quite flathead not quite Phillips cross on them and they thread on two posts rather than screwing into holes so not technically screws I'm kind of are but the front panel now has two spring-loaded magnet attached turns one at the top one at the bottom rather than just one and the screws you can just use fingers if you want or if you do want a screwdriver flat head or Phillips both work some owners of the original dark base pro 900 wanted these upgrades obviously and if you want to buy them separately from be quiet you can so that's an upside from the be quiet design document they said the following the new power saw crowd and hard drive slot covers will be available for customers using the first dark Bass Pro 900 version the windowed side panel and additional hard drive cages will be offered separately as well alright let's get into the thermal testing here this one's kind of interesting so the primary comparison for this case will be revision one we have plenty of other cases on the chart but we're gonna focus on the dark base Pro 900 revision 1 because we already focused the revision 1 versus everything house and it was ok overall for what it is so revision 2 has faster fans it's got a fan control that works a little bit differently and the results between the two cases should be different but the amount of improvement seen for example opening the front panel would approximately be the same so check your check our previous review to see temperature deltas from other scenarios like opening the front panel or taping off the mesh trim shot on the front this mesh right here in the front the only mesh on the front we taped that closed in the original test and just for fun and we have that in the original dark base Pro 900 review well kind of cover it briefly here but check the previous coverage basically for more of that and also check the previous coverage for overall build thoughts or thoughts on installation ease of installation build features all that stuff we talked about there absolutely no point going over it again because the inside of the case other than the stuff I've already mentioned it's all the same so if you want to know what we think of the case build quality stuff like that just watch the first review and we're gonna focus on thermal today for revision 2 we focused on testing with the fan controller we plugged the case fans into the motherboard and configure them to 100% speed for baseline stock testing and then for additional tests we tried a few things one setting the controller to performance mode and the slider to maximum because it is a slider and another one was performance mode and slider its minimum silent mode of sliders maximum silent mode with slider to minimum and so forth so the fan speed slider in the front panel is stepless so maximum and minimum settings are pretty easy to replicate and that's what we used we're starting with only the dark base pro 900 then we'll move on to comparative numbers this includes the old model for the dark base pro 900 revision 2 CPU temperature was 56 degrees Celsius over a min during the torture test and 55 degrees Celsius with the fans plugged it into the controller inside the performance mode then maxed out judging by the tempered since we can't log rpm using a controller it seems like the controller really does allow the fans of speed up at the full new speed and for revision two of the nine hundred results using the controller from best to worst were as follows performance mode with maximum speed was best silent mode with maximum speed performance mode with minimum speed and in silent mode with minimum speed even just in performance mode going from minimum to maximum brought CPU DT to sixty three point nine degrees over ambient versus fifty-five silent mode minimum rpm was by far the hottest test and the only reason it didn't go higher than seventy one point seven degrees is that the CPU is hitting 100 C and throttling hard that's because seventy one point seven is over ambient and it's also averaged so we were actually hitting a hundred in the middle of the test when it's the most torturous this mode would only be advisable for lower TDP systems with low load levels ie for browsing or desktop use compared to the old 900 stock 4 stock temperatures are improved from fifty eight point six degrees to 56 degrees not a huge change and our other tests were specific conditions like removing the front panel entirely and inverting the layout comparatively with other cases the original stock DBP 900 reached fifty eight point six degrees Celsius over ambient towards the warm end of our scale with its higher fan speeds the revision to blazes more toward the middle alongside the define R six and s 340 Elite Four how closed off the front panel is that's okay the DPP at 900 is overall unimpressive for cooling but it is also targeted more to the noise sensitive audience and makes no claims to be a top-class cooler the changes be quiet made are not significant enough to upset the charts particularly because the front panel is so blocked off that the higher-speed fans aren't able to get enough access to air to improve coin in any substantial way this is a matter of diminishing returns and starts boosting noise levels beyond what might be worth to begin with cooling is okay but not impressive for just the DVP 900 GPU torture test GPU dt average forty seven point six degrees celsius during the torture test with fir mark and almost exactly the same using the controller at max speed and performance mode the best to worst order of performance is the same as the cpu temperatures performance and max is the best silence and max performance and minimum silence and minimum and you get the idea the range of temperatures was smaller however and even the silent and minimum average CT was only fifty six point five degrees over ambient moving on to comparative GPU data we were surprised how well the revision two provided GPU cooling especially since it added a power supply shroud to the case that could potentially restrict airflow anyway a small part of this could be that we intentionally flipped the power supply over when reviewing the original because of restrictive ventilation on the bottom of the case which may have caused the power supply to compete with the GPU for air more importantly there's the higher rpm fans and the lack of pre-installed hard drive bays to block the airflow path from the front of the case whatever the reasons the revision to has some of the coolest GPU temperatures we've logged it recently well below the originals average of 54 point nine degrees Celsius and a lot of that is just because of how hugely open the front of the case is so even though the fans are blocked all of the air is going straight to the GPU whatever the error is that the fans can bring in it's not obstructed by anything that's going into the GPU the power supply shroud isn't designed in such a way that it doesn't eat too much of the performance and also the case is so gigantic that the power supply shroud to video card distance is great enough that it's not really interfering much with the GPU coolers ability to exhaust air so that's why we're seeing the results we are next up 3d mark GP temperatures were slightly higher in 3d mark stress testing that in the torture test averaging forty eight point eight degrees Celsius over ambient that's even farther below the original DBP 902 average of fifty seven point five CDT and impressively below most of the other cases on our chart as well GPA coolant is genuinely good in revision to something we wouldn't necessarily expect from a noise damage case but one that is a result of that higher rpm fan and just how damn large the case is rendering on the CPU with blender CPU DT was 38 point four degrees in the blender test that's fairly average and below but within margin of error of the original DBP 900 when utilizing the GPU gbzt there in the render was 24 c beaten by both the PMO one and half X but cooler than everything else noise levels are next even with all of be quiet annoys dampen running fans at 1600 rpm reached forty three point two to forty two point four DBA as loud as the DB 700 was dark bass 700 at max speed or the Silverstone RL zero six the quietest level we achieved using the 32.4 DBA only slightly above the n1 303 with no fans in it but keep in mind that the cooling is so bad that you really wouldn't want to use this setting for any kind of performance the main advantage of having silent and performance toggles on the fan controller is that there are two channels so two different groups of case fans can be set to two different speeds while being controlled by a single input the way we used it with both controllers flipped the same way it should just be set to performance mode that's because silent and minimum was that effectively the same noise level as performance in minimum about 33 DBA for performance and minimum scored better in most thermal testing and fan rpm can be maxed out in performance mode which is a huge bonus so again this becomes a greater discussion on do you go the noisier fan route with a more open case or do you do something more stifled and go a slower fans or faster fans to try and overcome them which is what be quieted so they stuck with the original silent paneling focus stuck faster fans in it and the result is that the case is actually really freaking loud when the fans are maxed out it's towards the worst end of the chart for noise if you consider noise bad but you can control it pretty easily it's got a fan controller there are two different sets of toggles you can do so if noise is a problem for you but you're okay with it when you're gaming maybe you have headphones on or something like that then it's not bad it's just that the case does a weird thing where performance is good actually overall yes but they're mixing both silence and performance in weird ways that ends up with either you have kind of mostly okay performance and good GPU performance when maxed out but not great noise performance or you have fantastic acoustic performance with not great thermal performance and it's gonna be up to you to set it the way that makes the most sense it's just it's one of those things where it's not really set it and forget it unless you're okay with noise or you're okay with awful thermals it's maybe you can set it in the middle and it'll tend to be towards the loud around but it does deviate from the original silence focus of the case and that's different different for be quiet it's not a bad thing necessarily it's just that the case is trying to do two different things simultaneously when it can really only do one at any given time and it's up to the user to figure out which one that is so just keep that in mind in performance the revision two has much better GPU cooling results than revision Wanda that's because revision 2 has faster fans and the layout is still huge 140 millimeter silent winds fans sell for $20 a piece or more on new eggs so upgrading an original DBP 900 to match revenues performance is an expensive proposition and cooling performance is the single best argument for purchasing the newer one versus the older one but only if it applies when fans are running above a thousand rpm if you're planning keeping them there or lower then don't bother basically revision 2 is a better performing case with a few more features than its predecessor which we already liked it's just altogether is it worth $20 more and making the power supply installation even more annoying than it is to get the revision 2 and we still like rev 1 for what it does watch the original review for that it's definitely not for everyone but it's really damn good when it is for you when it does fit your use case revision one's a good case and it's 20 bucks cheaper so this one's not bad it's just if you were basically if you're dying for the power supply shroud sure 20 bucks is worth it or if you wanted the faster fans but you don't want to buy your own seperately or don't already have some that I guess maybe it's worth it because the value proposition is there for the better fans so that's it for this one very high in flagship case we know not a ton of people buy cases in this price class but hopefully for those of you considering it you've got a decent review now to refer to and as always go to store our cameron's nexus dotnet to pick up some of our merch we have this shirt it's a limited edition shirt once they're gone they're gone we've sold through most of the inventory already but we still have some left and you can pick it up on store take yours XS Donna it's basically a foil shiny version of our anniversary edition logo or you can pick up the mod matte there as well she's a 4 foot by 2 foot computer building and modding service can patreon.com/scishow Nexus if you prefer to helps out that way or get access to our discord subscribe for more I'll see you all next time