After being lucky enough to bag the lovely Dark Base Pro in a recent forum competition, I've put together a build log/review of my experiences. Thought I'd go more visual so there's lots of pictures.
So it turns out I can only add 20 images per post, so I'll split this up - sorry!
TLDR: It's a nice case, but it's supremely frustrating.
First Impressions
The box was a bit roughed up, but it was seemingly shipped from Germany so I'll forgive that. Inside there is some polystyrene packing blocks and the case itself, wrapped in a nice black bag (mine was ripped at the back). It's also rather heavy, which is good. There's a box of bits inside, another box containing the LED strips and a worryingly thin user manual. Here's some pictures of it prior to starting work from all the relevant angles, also a comparison in size to my Fractal Arc Mini R4 (another lovely Hexus prize!):
Pre-build
Here's a snap of the inside of the Fractal, pretty cosy in there. The box-o-bits had a few bags of screws (no "spares" which I'll come to later..), an additional square rubber grommet for.. something? And a couple of metal supports for holding reservoirs etc (not used here). The LED strips looked standard. The manual is small, and has the usual 6 or 7 languages. The diagrams are tiny and not well illustrated and there's very little in the way of "instruction". Most of the operation was guesswork.
Let's go!
I'd done a bit of reading on the case while I was waiting for it to arrive and was interested in testing out the movable motherboard tray. I wanted to lower it down so the graphics card got a direct squirt of cool air from the front fans. There were bright orange grommets signalling which screws needed to be removed, so these came out and the tray dropped. I decided I'd be best mounting the board first before deciding on the tray position so all the screws went back in. I thought the next sensible thing would be to mount the PSU, so I happily unscrewed the bracket and attached the unit - only to find the screw holes for reattaching it to the case were now blocked. Wonderful - would be a good thing to mention in the manual. So I removed the PSU and re-attached the bracket. Turns out you have to take all the back panels off so you can fix the PSU in place from behind. After finally getting the PSU in place (and the extension cable fitted, I fastened all the back plates on again. Then I realised the switch was off and had to go and unscrew everything again to turn the PSU on. It was at this point I found the first design flaw - the screw holes that hold the back plates in place have a void underneath. I managed to drop one of the screws in to the rolled metal and couldn't get it back out - and no spare.