A Look Inside
Getting inside the Dark Base Pro is as simple as loosening the two captive screws on the main side panel and sliding it off. Taking a look inside we have a pretty standard two compartment layout with the top section to house your motherboard and then a power supply cover over the bottom compartment. The motherboard tray (and yes it is an actual tray) will support motherboards as large as E-ATX and XL-ATX. It has a built-in cable routing cover and you’ll notice there are just empty spaces above and below it for cable routing. This is because it can be removed from the case and completely inverted, we will show you this on the next page.
Towards the front of the case there are 5 removable tabs (more on those in a bit) and our fans of course. Towards the top of the case is a small fan hub that supports three fans. The cool thing about this hub is it is mounted to the cooling bracket on the front of the case and uses a pogo-style connector so when you want to remove the cooling bracket to clean or swap out your fans you don’t have to worry about disconnecting them. Also towards the front of the case is a removable section on the power supply cover. This can be swapped out for a ventilated one if you want better cooling for your drives that will be installed below.
The power supply cover is full-length and has a Dark Base Pro logo in the center as well as a RGB strip the goes across the whole thing. It is also worth noting that there is another 3-fan hub towards the top of the inside of the case. Just like the one on the front it has a pogo-style connector so you can completely remove the top cooling bracket without having to disconnect any fans.
Removing the opposite side panel we can see that it is lined with sound dampening material.
With the back panel removed we can see how the rest of the case is designed. On the backside of the motherboard tray are two 2.5-inch storage brackets. These are fully removable from the case. It is also worth noting that there are metal cable routing channels on the backside of the motherboard tray. These can be removed if you don’t want to use them.
At the bottom of the case we have our power supply mount, which has more than enough room for the longest power supplies. Then towards the front of the case is a hard drive cage that has two removable storage trays. Each one of these trays either support a single 3.5-inch drive or two 2.5-inch drives. So out of the box this case will support up to six 2.5-inch drives or two 3.5-inch drives and two 2.5-inch drives. You will need to remove this hard drive cage if you want to make use of the 5.25-inch drive bay on the front of the case.
