Assembly

Installing the motherboard is straightforward using the pre-installed spacers and securing the board with screws. Looking at the rear of the BTF board, you can see all the connectors are accessible, but we did temporarily remove the incorrectly installed grommets on the side of the board as well. For this type of board, you will want to remove the HDD cage in advance as well. On top of that, we also temporarily removed a bracket to secure cable management to, but that is really a necessity if you are opting for a micro-BTF board.


Adding a GPU is just as easy and due to the spacious interior of the Light Base 900 DX, won't be an issue, regardless of which pixel pusher you have in mind.


Installing the PSU is easy but a bit more complicated than it really needs to be. be quiet! has placed foam pads around the bay, which naturally provide high friction, so you have to force the unit into place. There is a movable bracket at the top, to sandwich the power supply firmly in place as well. Its design suggests that it has other uses too, but the manual literally lacks all insights around the PSU for some reason, so your guess is as good as mine. Even our potent Dark Power 13 unit still has plenty of room so you should also be able to install any unit of your choice within the Light Base 900 DX.


With the case, you will also receive be quiet!'s second generation HDD cage. It is now tool-less, using four little plastic wings. Simply slide the drive into place (with the foam block, if you like) and close these wings to pin the drive down. While we are always skeptical of plastic mechanisms like this, the storage unit is quite secure without any wiggle room. Once filled, you can slide the cage back into the HDD mounting frame and secure it with the three screws it came with. As you can see, we did connect all motherboard wiring before putting the cage back into place, as doing so after the fact is just a bit tight. If you are using 2.5" drives, the drive cage can hold two of those units in place of that one 3.5" spinning rust variant.


To install any cooling in the ceiling or floor of the chassis, you have to take out mounting frame and attach such components first. It would have been nice if the frame had hooks for zip ties, as there is plenty of space for such a feature. Adding our usual 360 mm AIO went off without a hitch, and you still have tons of clearance in all directions. This means you can also go the extra mile with a thick radiator or a push/pull fan configuration. The only downside is the fact that there is no dedicated cable management hole at the very top of the case for the wires, and the top two openings above the motherboard lack grommets. As such you will have a hard time hiding all the wiring.


To add 2.5" drives to the dedicated mounting plate, you first have to install four smooth pin screws and then push it into the four rubber rings. While this works quite well, you will still need to use a screwdriver to secure those pins. Other implementations we have seen have ridged ones, allowing them to be hand-tightened.


With everything installed, and the grommets back in place, the interior of the be quiet! Light Base 900 DX is nice and clean. Due to the big flaps on the grommets, you won't be able to keep that disturbance in those places to a minimum and as such even our single GPU power cable keeps half the grommet open. On top of that, the IO and RGB wiring in the front of the chassis can't be hidden either, unless you install cooling in the side of the case. On the back, we managed to cable manage everything really well, thanks to the mix of the now four Velcro strips, classic hooks for zip ties and several larger hooks to attach PSU wires to. The only tricky area was above the PSU, where we had to simply bunch up all the AIO wiring to the CPU power cable with zip ties.

Finished Looks

Turning the system on, you are greeted by four very nicely diffused LED strips. The be quiet! Light Base 900 DX sports a whooping three meters of LED strips with 172 LEDs in total. The implementation means that it seamlessly animates across the three sides of the chassis, which looks fantastic. A white power LED also lights up at the center of the square power button. Last but certainly not least, both the be quiet! logos are also nicely backlit in white on the top and bottom (or sides, depending on your setup).


Thanks to the clear glass panels, you can easily see all your hardware from the front as well as side. In the rear, everything is where you would expect to see it. be quiet! could have added some external hooks as a small extra to allow for exterior cable management by simply punching a few hooks into some unused parts of the case as well.


As mentioned previously, you can flip the case over to make the board stand on its head, and as such have the GPU with its fans facing up. For this setup, we also moved the AIO to the side of the chassis. The third possibility is to move the feet unto the metal side panel and place the system on its side. No matter what you pick, all three options work extremely well and require no compromises at all.

On top of all that, the controller allows you to cycle through several single color animations on top of the rainbow one you see above. Besides those, you can pick from seven solid color options. The total number of settings isn't as diverse as some other built-in controllers, but you can always opt for motherboard control if you want to play with these LEDs. be quiet! ships the case on the solid orange color setting out of the box, their brand color, which is quite the attention to detail.