Gadgetory

the dark based Pro 900 has finally arrived on the GN test bench now available in the limited white edition this $250 full Tower prioritizes enthusiast focus functionality and modularity above all else permitting a layout inversion and an attempt at mixing silence and performance we spent a few days building in and benchmarking the dark Bass Pro 900 and now we've arrived to a verdict on B quiets latest enthusiast enclosure before that this is brought to you by the EVGA 240 c LC which is a $120 MSRP closed-loop liquid cooler the EVGA 240 c LC has an RGB illuminated pump plate uses a thermal probe within the lower pump chamber for liquid temperature monitoring and allows customization through software learn more at the link in the description below be quiet went hard with this case they wanted to prove a point put a whole bunch into it to see what could really come out of a $250.00 enclosure there was a point in the industry when $200 plus enclosures were far more common for example the days around when the half ex was popular that was around 200 bucks the phantom 820 the switch whatever was 810 and plenty of other cases as well the throne the Thor was an expensive case the corsair obsidian cases there was a period when these were very common but versus today's standards those cases were missing a lot of modern features so the be quiet dark Bass Pro 900 been out for about a year now but this is the white version we never reviewed the first ones we've got a full thermal and noise suite for you in addition to building and the inversion process which is detailed in the article below written by Patrick Leith and for gamers Nexus a few items to point out before going through most of his notes and then my own thermal notes so the case itself is currently in its inverted layout you can flip it all the other way just like the cosmos see 700 P that we worked on at PAX and flipping it around entails a bunch of screws probably about a 45 minute job the first time you do it to make sure you do it right and we have a shot of like all the screws on the magnetic pad to show how there it's there's a bit of work in it but it's not too bad a couple key features tempered glass of course it is a tinted window for this one there is mesh ventilation along the entire top and bottom which those of you who watch our content regularly know that that's what both Patrick and I look for in a case for the most part we want functionality first and a ventilation is functional that's that's something that's missing on a lot of cases so we'll test we actually later on tape this off to see how much it does passively the Intendant use of this is you can put fans in the bottom and at the top the case ships with three there are two in the front one in the rear and they are all 140s and these are these silent winds three fans which are be quiet newer fans they actually retail for around or over twenty dollars making the fans included in this case some of the most expensive that we've worked with for a stock fan and a case in quite a while a lot of the stock fans are pure garbage and should either be replaced or never have been included in the first place be quiet thankfully actually put something good in there $200 enclosure so you won't have to go through and replace the fans so that's what it's got start with let's go through some of his build notes and then get into the thermals and noise the build was a strange mix of convenience and complexity the dark bass pro 900 has a ton of features notably the invertible layouts that make it largely intimidating to build in but you don't need to use all those features there's another example installing the power supply took several minutes of studying the manual the power supply screws into a bracket and that bracket slots into four screws already installed in the case and then the bracket is secured with two additional screws on the side and eventually you get an internal power cable that plugs into the power supply going out to the external one the manual lists six slightly different ways to install the power supply despite the complexity everything fits together exactly as intended the top front and bottom compartments of the case although we left them empty clearly had a lot of thought put into them there are tons of places to install additional fans and radiators all of them are inside layers of acoustic foam and thick panels that be quiet takes pride in the panel thickness is one of the main ways that be quiet can help deal with the higher pitched wines and the damping foam also assists in this by breaking up the sound waves the attention to detail on this aspect extends to a thin foam ring around the edges of the tempered glass panel to cushion it and seal in the noise two fans can be installed in the filtered vent on the side panel although this is intended more for the non tempered glass version of the case where these fans can be aimed at the CPU and GPU rather than at the back of the motherboard or if you wanted tempered glass on the motherboard side you can do it in the pro version cable management is good but requires some planning cables must be routed through the motherboard tray rather than over its edges as otherwise they'll keep the side panel from sliding on there are plenty of cable type points as well as six of velcro ties and the sheer size of the case makes it easy to find space that's fortunate because without a power supply shroud there's nothing to hide lazy cable management the fanciest pieces of hardware included are the Qi charger and the fan controller PCB somehow despite being a tech review site nobody here has a single cell phone capable of wireless charging at Gian HQ so we can only speak for the fan controller the deluxe version included in the pro case has for each of the three and four pin fan plugs two led connections for the two included RGB strips and these are unfortunately adhesive rather than magnetic something that we didn't like and there's an option for PWM control in addition to the standard manual slider on the front of the case when connected to the motherboard this allows the PC to control fan speed when the manual slider is turned all the way down LEDs can be switched to red green blue white or orange if you prefer as well the free-floating hard drive slots are familiar from past be quiet cases and are as good as ever each slot in the rack is held in with three captive screws and can easily be taken out to improve airflow there's an optical drive at caged but if it's removed you can replace it with an additional fan bracket which is another minor attention to detail that's only doubled up by the fact that the front five and a quarter inch bays our mesh covered so there's actually a mesh there to deal with dust even if you don't install the fan well you have the empty case the only concern we had was the lack of powersploit ventilation this isn't an unfortunate consequence of being invertible power supply needs to be able to shift side-to-side which requires two sets of screw holes and that means there has to be a solid structure in those places the bottom filter covers the entire length of the case so it can't be moved with the power supply and this leaves a small strip of ventilation right in the dead zone of the power supply fan and the rubber bumpers that lift the power supply up offer little air flow through the sides we chose to just flip it over and draw air from inside the case for our thermal tests instead and that's really the only major complaint we had about this in the build process now keeping in mind a few things cases are 50% subjective at least it looks one thing that's up to you build process ease of installation a lot of that is based on experience based on what you like and this is the kind of case that I like working with it's the kind of case that Patrick generally in his time reviewing cases with us has also liked working with so that means that we are going to be more likely to like the features that are part of a larger full tower enthusiast case if you don't generally like those things that's completely fine but that is one of those things where with a case it's a subjective element we'll get into the objective stuff momentarily but objective subjective whatever blocking off half of the power supply ventilation with that bottom structure is suboptimal for sure to put it lightly it's really not it's not an ideal way to do it I'm not gonna say it's not the best way to do it because the thing is be quiet really didn't have a lot of options you need structure there if you're going to be offering features like inverting the case and that requires shifting the power supply around to accommodate everything so there may just not have been a better way to do it but hopefully a revision 2 will have some kind of improvement there otherwise flip the power supply face the fan internally you're good to go for anyone buying this case will have a guide to how to invert the layout in the article linked below it'll also give you an idea of how long it takes but let's get into therm now so the dark based Pro 900 is customizable enough that we really wanted to experiment with it part of that includes a lot of standalone this case only tests like the stock opposite configuration the inverted configuration front door open side ventilation porch open it pops out taping off the passive ducts when there are no fans installed top or bottom just to see what kind of air gets through them when they are used passively for air moving in and out of the case lots of fun stuff so we go through all that and then we'll get into the comparatives well start with be quiet configurations then expand outward with our torture test the CPU is plotting a fifty eight point six Celsius delta T over ambient load temperature without adding any fans we taped off the side ventilation just to see if there's a meaningful impact from drafting air the result was an increase in temperature of about one Celsius from taping those ports off that moves us to 59.4 Celsius delta T over ambient these matter more when the bottom mounted or top mounted fans are present naturally we ultimately remove the tape and open up the front door for the next test reducing temperature to 51 on nine Celsius delta T a mark at six to seven Celsius decrease from the stock configuration noise goes up a bit as well show later but the thermals benefit greatly opening the side ventilation port behind the motherboard tray produced a fifty six point eight Celsius temperature over ambient not hugely beneficial and more suitable for the non pro model of the case when mounting extra side panel fans finally inverting the case to be right facing resulted in significantly improved CPU thermals out fifty two point four Celsius with our tower cooler and that's over ambience that's what the door closed just to be clear so inverting it got us that change a few quick things here case testing although we can do it scientifically is ultimately one of the most difficult things a test because you can only really test for the configuration you built in this example of the inverted layout being significantly better for CPU thermals than the stock layout the big thing to take note of is we're using at our cooler an air cooler and that means that the air cooler is now in a straight line from the rear exhaust and the front intake of both and so it's basically an optimal setup if you're using a closed-loop liquid cooler or even an open-loop cooler it's really not going to matter what orientation you're in all that matters is where's the radiator and that can pretty much be any of the locations in either rotation of the board for the most part so this is representative of a tower cooler configuration with a dual axial fan looking at comparative data for the CPU Torture thermals now the be quiet dark based pro 900 stock configuration performs about tied with the NZXT s340 elite the bigger question will be one of noise levels which will get into inverting the case and boost performance upwards towards the top five placing it alongside the Corsair and silver some products that benefit from more direct airflow to the CPU and out of it looking at GPU performance under torture workloads again with be quiet first the stock configuration runs the GPU at fifty four point nine cells use LT over ambient with a side ventilation opening not measurable outside of error margins the GPU runs about two Celsius warmer with the ventilation taped off and showing that there is actual passive benefit here and the inverted configuration hovers us around one cells is warmer than stock this is because we've moved where the video card is in the enclosure as it now sits out of the way of the intake fans and is really just relying on its own cooler for most of the cooling potential opening the front door and sticking to the stock configuration helps the most bringing out 250 1.2 Celsius delta T over ambient comparatively the stock 54.9 celsius dt lands us between the 570 x at 10:50 rpm and b quiets own pure bass 600 at 11 and 60 rpm opening the door puts us up to second place on the charts between the fan happy Cullinan and 570 X moving on to 3d mark for a real world gaming test the dark bass pro 900 white edition case performs nearly at levels of an open-air case like the core P 3 considering that the core P 3 is the closest thing we have here to an open-air bench and is limited in the list of cases on our new 3d mark they're all test that's good performance before the dark bass pro is at CPU thermals GPU temperatures are a bit warmer but still outside of the throttle territory by a few degrees it could be better on the GPU front for sure but we just recommend either a modestly more aggressive fan profile on the video card or an additional fan near the GPU bottom intake would work excellently for this or top if you end up inverting the thing blender serves as another real-world test with CPU rendering and the GPU idle the CPU scores a 39 Celsius temperature over ambience planting the dark base Pro 900 right around where the silverstone KL 0 7 another science focused case ends up landing on the charts performance is completely acceptable here the GPU idles where the P 3 and K L 0 7 do but is warmer than the Silverstone RL 0 6 and it's highly directional airflow and front mesh switching to GPU rendering the CPU and GPU both run similarly to the silence focused KL 0 7 there's nothing to boast or complain about here so let's move on to noise be quiet inclusion of three high-performance fans benefit the cases noise levels these fans retailer for around $20 each making them some of the best pre-installed fans that we've worked with lately and its stock configuration our system operates at about 34 point 4 DBA the same as when the side ventilation is open rather expectedly opening the front door provides significant thermal benefit and ultimately increases noise levels audibly but just barely we're at thirty seven point two versus thirty four point four DBA comparatively that lands be quiet case around the 270 are and pure bass 600 with its top open and max rpm the front open configuration programs were similarly to the streamlined our l06 airflow case and really is a good look for something as large and as silent focused as be quiet system so for the conclusion here a few things patrick makes great points in his article when he says that a case of this expensive isn't meant to be for people who are value conscious it's made for people who know what they want and those people will pay $250 to get it so in order to justify the dark based pros price it doesn't need a competitive price or performance ratio it's not competing with something like an RL 0 6 which is clearly a far better option if the only thing you ever want is cool in performance and you don't need any of this you just need a box to put it in that's pretty damn good and it's way cheaper but it's not really the point either the point to the be quiet case it's partially modular far more than most other cases maybe see 700 P excluded and it achieves relative silence it's not too far off from the pure base 600 or 800 previously it's got high end fans in it and if you're spending upwards of 200 bucks on a case this is definitely a worthy choice it's among the top in our list for consideration there aren't a lot of good $200 cases these days and this is one of them so be quiet stun well here now a couple things this type of system build with a large case like this is precisely the kind of case I've always used and I'm we don't normally talk about like personal history with parts or existing preferences for parts but my existing preference with cases has been function focused so that's going to be cooling and has been focused generally on having something a bit bigger to work with because again personally speaking I use a lot of drives if that's not you that's perfectly fine we've reviewed a lot of cases on the channel we've got experience with probably a lot of them dozens and dozens at this point so there's plenty of experience there to inform your decisions for all different types of use cases if you feel like your use case is similar to mine and you like similar things that I do this is a good case it's just expensive if you can afford it great pick it up if not there are a couple of other good options for you you might want to consider looking at things like the 570 X or the view 71 both of those are similarly kind of premiere cases that are a bit cheaper they are very heavy on the tempered glass so it might not like that but other options the BitFenix Shogun that's very hit and miss depending on how you feel about its looks but it's another one of those larger cases kind of expensive but not as much as this one and then there are plenty of options in the 100 class as well maybe the 600 C would be worth looking into if that's your thing so that's all for this one as always thank you for watching you go to patreon.com/scishow gamers access to helps out directly and subscribe for more I'll see you all next time you