be quiet! Dark Base 700 Chassis Review
Peter Donnell / 7 years ago
A Closer Look – Interior
The interior of the be quiet! Dark Base 700 couldn’t be any cleaner looking. A lot of care has gone into the little details, ensuring that it has everything you need, but still have the maximum amount of space possible for all of your hardware.
Starting at the bottom, you’ll find a full-length PSU shroud hides most of the cable gore. Of course, it’ll hide a few storage drives too, keeping the front of the chassis free for fun stuff like GPUs and radiators.
What’s cool is that the PSU cover uses four pop-out panels. Just remove these panels, and you can quickly get your hands in to tinker with hardware while building your system. For some builds, these openings could be handy for adding mods, water cooling hardware, bigger radiators, and much more.
There’s comprehensive radiator support in the front of the chassis, and room for 120mm or 140mm fans. Of course, there’s a single 140mm Silent Wings fan already there too, which is a nice bonus.
There’s another 140mm fan in the back, with plenty of room for a 120/140mm radiator or AIO cooler.
In the top, much of the same, with another large cooling mount located there.
All the Cool Stuff is Hiding!
Removing the rear panel, you can see that it has a thick coating of noise dampening material. The Dark Base is a be quiet! chassis after all, so expect it to literally be quiet.
There are all kinds of cool stuff here, starting with a decent amount of cable routing space behind the motherboard. Furthermore, there’s ample room for a big PSU, and any excess cables in the base.
These neat little things are great for cable routing. Squeeze it, push it further through, and you get a super clean cable run.
See how it opened out on this side? That’s pretty neat!
There is a six-port fan hub built in, with a PWM controller and SATA power connector. You can control this right from the front panel, or your system using PWM on the “Auto” mode.
There are two 3.5″ drive trays. Of course, they’re entirely removable to suit your needs also.
One of the coolest features, removable motherboard mounts. These mounts mean you can flip the motherboard tray and mount it on the other side. That’s right, you can put the motherboard on the other side of the chassis, and move the glass to this side; how freaking cool is that.