Be Quiet! Dark Mount gaming keyboard review

I recently interrupted a colleague mid-flow on an old Razer Huntsman to ask why they enjoy clacky keyboards so much. In response, they offered me an impassioned speech about mechanical keyboards, concluding with the words "God, I wish it had a lever, you know? Something I could pull at the end of every line — like a type writer!"

Seems some of us yearn for a return to ~ The Contraption ~ but what if you still want that tactility without the risk of waking up the whole house with your 3 AM machinations (or in my case, yet another run of Blue Prince because I refuse to be beaten by a shape shifting mansion of all things)? Well, stewards of silence Be Quiet have recently expanded into peripherals, ushering in sound dampened gaming keyboards that will allow you to plot in peace. As a modular, full-size keyboard, the Dark Mount not only enjoys versatility, but a premium price point to match at $255/£240/€260.

Before I really dive into the weeds, let me address the most obvious point first: is it actually that quiet? In a word, yes; while not completely silent, multiple layers of sound dampening foam and silicone make every keypress pleasingly understated. Even the space bar, typically the noisiest key on many keebs, has been quietly wrangled here.

Besides its sound dampening innards, the Dark Mount unit I'm reviewing owes much of its lower-key clacks to Be Quiet's silent linear mechanical switches. To briefly compare it to its smaller sibling, the Light Mount, these switches give every keypress a lovely, straightforward actuation without the oh-so-subtle springy feedback of Be Quiet's also available tactile switches.

In my Light Mount review, I likened every keypress upon those tactile switches to a steady descent towards solid ground. To leverage the same metaphor, the tactile switches offer a little bit of a grassy bounce while the linear switches on the Dark Mount are perhaps more akin to gently touching down on hardwood flooring.

The keycaps themselves are made of PBT rather than the smoother feeling ABS, though this more textured feel doesn't distract from what remains some great feeling keys (as far as materials go, PBT is the hardier, longer-lasting choice besides). But, if neither that or any of the above is your vibe, you can swap both keycaps and switches very easily with the puller that comes in the box. So long as what you want to swap in is compatible with the board's 5-pin sockets, you can customise the feel of the Dark Mount to your liking.

Now, let me finally address the nervous truck in the room: there's more than meets the eye to this gaming keyboard. On its own, there's not much to it, with the exceedingly extra RGB light bar lining the entire outer edge of the board being the main thing differentiating it from the Light Mount at first glance.

Like that smaller keyboard, you can also adjust the brightness and flick through lighting profiles using shortcuts mapped to the function and arrow keys, with further customisation possible in Be Quiet's IO Center software. With itty bitty, individually customisable segments that run the entire light-up-length of the keyboard, the Dark Mount's underglow lighting effect is a real show stopper.

But even with such an impressive light show, this tiny desk party is only just getting started. Flipping the main part of the keyboard over, you'll notice a number of extra USB-C ports. Besides the expected USB-C port on the top edge of the keyboard for the dedicated wired connection to your PC, there are two more besides it, plus another two found on the right and left hand edges of the board. These are for the Dark Mount's two main modular attachments, included in the box.

As modular designs go, The Dark Mount isn't simply reminiscent of the Mountain Everest Max, but the numberpad attachment feels directly comparable—and that's for good reason. This is because Be Quiet's parent company, Listan Group, bought Mountain a few years back, with both the modular Dark Mount and its Light Mount sibling likely the direct results of that acquisition.

My review unit comes with a media dock that can be slotted into two positions along the top edge, plus a numberpad that can slot in on either the left or right edge of the keyboard for ambidextrous placement. The numberpad features more of its lovely, sound-dampened PBT keys, plus eight more remappable buttons above those.

The media dock features a tactile scroll wheel for volume control, plus a number of media control buttons, as well as a small integrated screen with its own menu navigation buttons. Scrolling from left to right, this small dock screen offers controls for time, date, and brightness, plus some basic lighting profile customisation options.

Installing the Dark Mount's modular attachments is fairly straightforward, though I initially found the number pad's retractable USB-C connector quite stiff. My oh-so-helpful colleague had no such issue however, demonstrating that the numberpad is far sturdier than I'd initially worried. Generally, the modular design's attachment mechanisms are fairly elegant, concealed by easily detached dustcover panels when not in use—though I feel like these are the first things I'm going to lose.

Dustcovers ready to go walkabout are far from the only inelegant aspect of this keyboard, either. Ready to fry some small potatoes? To begin with, the modular design of the keyboard necessitates a similarly separated magnetically attached wrist rest, making it feel much less secure than the Light Mount's detachable palm rest.

The ambidextrous placements available for both the numberpad and the media dock make this a versatile keyboard—but unfortunately, the Dark Mount hasn't completely won me over on the subject of modular keyboards. For a start, I'm well and truly a media knob convert, so the Dark Mount's low profile scroll wheel just doesn't do it for me. The low-profile media and menu control buttons are similarly too shallow to actuate in a way that offers much tactile feedback; on a mechanical keyboard, I found it an odd sensory contrast.

The eight plastic buttons on the numberpad offer slightly clickier feedback, but there's no question that the numbered PBT keys below are the main event. Still, these eight keys can be customised via IO Center to offer a variety of functions with one press. It's neat to, say, put my PC to sleep or open the task manager with a single button click. But, like the co-ord that seemed like a good idea at the time but is destined for Depop, I just don't reach for them. Still, just because I couldn't make this versatile keyboard work for me, doesn't mean that you won't easily make it your own.

Not to encourage any sibling rivalry, but I found myself vastly preferring the cheaper Light Mount (even if it isn't as affordable as its respective keyboard ancestor, the Mountain Everest 60). As nice as it is, I came away feeling the Dark Mount's attachments were much-of-a-muchness for my day-to-day use.

There's also the fact that, on both of Be Quiet's keyboard offerings to date, gaming-specific features are light on the ground for the price point. If you're looking for a more esports-geared feature set that includes Rapid Trigger and customisable actuation, I'd say you're better off picking up the Corsair K70 Pro TKL (though you can find even cheaper options among our best gaming keyboards guide). That said, for my money (and my cluttered desk space), the Light Mount still does everything else I want in a much more focused package compared to the Dark Mount, while also offering some of the most vibrant, customisable RGB-lighting I've had the pleasure of gawping at.