BeQuiet Dark Mount – A Personal Review
Introduction
Introduction
Here at OC3D we always try and be as neutral as possible. Obviously we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t have preferences. It could be liking a certain colour, like the bossman and his quest to make everything white or red. Or it could be my own ethos of silence first, performance second, nothing else matters. But we step away from that when reviewing and treat each product on its own merits. So I always write about we, rather than I. Because it has to be a consensus, rather than personal. Many an argument has been had when we differ wildly, and some remain a bone of contention.
But the important thing is that we end up agreeing on what we, as OC3D, feel about something. The bold truth of performance graphs are the foundation upon which our reviews are built. What has that to do with this Be Quiet Dark Mount? For that, I need to peek out from behind the curtain. Obviously I’m primarily a writer, and that can be done remotely. If the modern world has brought us anything useful it is the ability to have all the in-depth show and tell of face-to-face, without always being in the same building.
In The Fields
Remote work, as anyone who took to it in recent years, has some downsides. If you’re a writer, the downside is the noise of bashing out a few thousand words every day. Typing at a certain speed requires NKEY rollover, otherwise you lose characters. Chiclet/scissor/laptop style keyboards usually crap out at 6 keys at a time. Which is what makes “mechanical” keyboards so wonderful. You get a familiar typing experience without wasting valuable time because letters got missed out. Hold down both shift keys on your keyboard and type the alphabet. It’s a great demonstration as to why you might be dropping inputs. So you need quiet, but mechanical, and those two things rarely match up.
What’s All That To Do With Today?
The Ducky One 3 was the first mechanical keyboard I reviewed that genuinely was quiet. It had loads of chassis damping to soak up the noise. But it was quiet relative to mechanicals, not scissor type keys. Now things got spicy. Be Quiet released their x Mount range of keyboards with their orange switches, at about the same time as Ducky released their One X with their inductive switches. I reviewed the Ducky, and found it to be about as quiet as one could realistically expect a mechanical keyboard to be. Although obviously in this case the switches were inductive.
Following Tom’s test of the Dark Mount, we spent a while going back and forth about their comparative noise. I need something I can work on whilst the family watch TV without having to dodge crockery because of the noise. So the claims that the Be Quiet! offering was quieter than the Ducky were met with disbelief by yours truly. Then I tried it.
If you read my recent review of the Ducky Cushion 98 you’ll know I reference this Dark Mount keyboard a fair bit. Because it was so much quieter than the One X it was scarcely believable. Ducky must have felt so too as the Cushion 98 takes a lot of lessons from this glorious Be Quiet! effort. But that’s a cut-down keyboard, with okay lighting, and nothing much else to ease my workload. The Dark Mount is not only basically silent, but has a media dock to control the vital ‘writing music’, and eight customisable, Stream Deck style buttons.
But it’s the silence that’s King. Let me give you a quick refresher on the looks, a taste of the software, nit-pick the couple of areas that would truly make it perfect and then wrap up.
Technical Specifications
