be quiet! Light Mount and Dark Mount Keyboard Review

Screen, Switches and Silence

Screen, Switches and Silence

As if grabbing eight custom screen switches wasn’t enough, the Dark Mount also comes with a media dock. You can fit it in two places, left and right. We’ve an idea to propose which we’ll leave to our conclusion. Here it is both separated and attached in one of its two positions.

On the back you can see the two Type-C mounting holes for the screen we saw above. One behind F2 and one behind F12. In the middle is the Type-C connection for the USB power cable.

We like that there are two places to put the screen, rather than limiting us to just one. We think the right hand side is preferable aesthetically, but the choice is yours. Certainly if you like things a little more balanced then having it on the left, and leaving the eight Display Keys on the right, gives you a screen at either end.

Switches

There are two different switch types available from be quiet!. Black and Orange. Our keyboards have the Orange ones. These are linear 45g numbers. Very much the Cherry MX of the be quiet! range. If you like your keys with a tactile bump and a bit sturdier, the Black switches have a tactile bump – like Cherry MX Brown – and have 55g actuation force. These switches are all pre-lubricated for the silkiest experience, and the stalk has the regulation cross letting you swap keycaps with ease if you choose.

If you can’t quite envisage the difference between a linear switch and one with a tactile bump, the following graphs should clear things up.

It’s worth noting that the be quiet! supplied graph has a typo. Obviously the tactile ones are the Black switches, not the Orange ones as we saw above.

As we said, ours came with the linear Orange switches and it’s a joy to type on.

Sssshh

We have often spoken about how quiet Ducky Channel keyboards are, and they have a multi-layer setup. If it’s not broken, why fix it. be quiet! have taken a leaf out of the Ducky book and built the Dark Mount with three sound absorbing layers, as you can see here. Foam and silicone ensure that any boings and echoes are muted.

How do all those layers fit together? Easily. You might imagine that all this padding and dampening can’t make a difference. It unquestionably does. We’d be disappointed if a keyboard from the silence masters wasn’t actually pretty darn quiet.

It’s easy to imagine the Dark Mount is huge because of all its extras, but in actuality it’s a regular sized keyboard even with everything in place.