be quiet! Dark Base 701 Case Review

Complete System

It’s not exactly surprising that this build looks as good as it does, as this is a high-end and feature-packed PC case that ticks all the right boxes for a modern gaming PC.

It’s a longer case, so dealing with massive graphics cards absolutely won’t be a problem, and the largest of the RTX 4090s will fit in here. However, if you did have a thick radiator in the front with push/pull fans, that may limit you a bit, but that’ll be a pretty small percentage of users who do this.

There’s the option to mount the GPU vertically too, but you will need your own riser cable, which isn’t that expensive these days anyway, especially not when compared to the price of the graphics card itself. I happened to have a be quiet! riser cable in the store room though, so I put it in and it does look stunning!

Cable management is very good, as there are large cable routing holes in the right places around the motherboard, as well as some modular panels towards the front.

The addition of a full-length PSU shroud means you’ve got plenty of room to cram excess cables out of sight, and since all your HDD and SSD mounts are hidden in the back too, the final build looks very neat and tidy, with few trailing cables. The only one I would have liked is a small hole in the PSU shroud to allow vertical pass-through of the GPU power cables, but it’s hardly a deal breaker.

There’s a lot of room here for additional cooling too, from large tower air coolers to 360mm radiators, you’re given the option for either here.

Previously be quiet! focused on silence with thicker panels and an indirect airflow design. However, these newer models are much more airflow-focused. The bonus is that usually cases come with fairly cheap fans installed, but to counter the increased noise from the mesh design, the Silent Wings 4 fans are about as good a fan as you can buy, and it pays off, they’re very very quiet!

The RGB is a nice touch too, and provides a bit of customisation to the front of the case without turning your case into a disco. I prefer this to having ARGB fans, not that I don’t like ARGB fans, but they’re often not quite as good fans as fans that have been designed purely to move air and be quiet… damn, the be quiet! brand name just sneaks up on you sometimes.

The front panel pulls away easily enough with a firm tug. There’s a fine mesh filter on the front…

…but also a microfine mesh behind that too.

However, my favourite trick here is the RGB, which uses a set of contact pins rather than a cable, so you can remove the front panel and not pull the cables out, which is great.