Be Quiet! PSU Pob review

[Pob255]

Part 1 - unboxing and the outsides

Well here's my review thread for the Hexus competition


It's a box and it's got lots of blurb on the sides, well that shows it's a retail unit not an OEM.
I've not bothered to take a photo of ever side, we've got blurb in english, german, french, spanish and polish


Open it up, really nice box design, it's a box within a box, ok some of you are not going to be impressed by that but good packaging is nice to see.
psu and cables are held in place by the inner box and each is in it's own bubble wrap bag. No additional bags to hold the cables when not in use.

Be Quiet! shows their location as a german company in the manual as the first language is german not english, it's not amazingly detailed, lots of stuff about the psu and just a small section on installation.


And here's the psu itself


Just handling it, it's a nice unit, solid heft, not flimsy steel and the main 20+4pin cable is well fixed, lifted it up by the cable and there's no movement on it.
I love the bar fan grill, it's a very nice system with low air flow restriction and looks great (others use it now but be quiet were the first people to use this bar system, that I'm aware of.)


Close up of the fan and a peak at the internals.
The fan looks interesting, actually fairly standard apart from the texture blade surface, have to see how it performs.


The unit is a black powder coat, fairly fine grain rather than a smooth finish, this gives it a nice matte black look.
I'll see how tough it is later


Cables come in two bunches, held together with velcro ties, which could be used for cable management.
The sleeving is nice, not the softest or densest I've seen, but I've seen worse.
The ends are cable tied then shrink wrapped, stops about 2cm short of the connectors or all the cables.
Solid, no slippage, the only better cable braiding I've seen have been custom jobs.
All the wires are good 18 gauge wires.


My one complaint, the mid way sata connectors are all this in/out type not T section type, there are benefits and downsides to both type, but personally I prefer the T type, but as these are modular cables I should be able to make up my own with T type connectors

Well to sum up my first quick look, it looks very good but will it hold up?
For that I'm going to have to keep you hanging, sorry hexites but I'm going to be rather busy next week, maybe the week after as well.
However I should have a whole week off work coming up so I'll be able to give this thing a real going over, including opening it up to get a good look inside.


like that's going to last long.

[Pob255]

Just checked free this weekend, so I'll borrow a multi meter from work tomorrow and get on with finishing this.

any requests at specific areas people want me to look at?

I'll try and shoehorn this into my casecom, and then move on to the HAF 912+ I've got sitting there waiting. (good excuse to move my system over)

[Max Tractor]

Nice pics, who makes the units and what is it max power output, also was going to ask what the price was, but not sure if you won it.


cheers

[Pob255]

Thanks, scan has it listed as £98 http://www.scan.co.uk/products/680w-...-quiet-fan-atx
Must admit for the cost I'd of expected a bit more in the way of extras, bag to keep spare cables in and a set of black thumb screws would of been nice.

I've just finished my initial look at it, currently running on it

not opened it up yet, I will say now that while a bit short the 8pin lead was no shorter than my enermax psu so it's reached round the back of the motherboard tray, could of done with and extra couple of inches.

Just have to process and upload photo's before I can start on part 2, that might have to wait until tomorrow.

EDIT: OK I'm an idiot, I didn't fully check the box I just did to put my enermax psu inside it when I found a jiffy bag containing . . . 4 black screws and 4 black cable ties.
Going to have to take another picture.

[Pob255]

Part 2

To start with a correction, there are included screws and cable ties


Now we move on to the issue of the 8pin length, that Rob_B highlighted in his review


Hard to tell in this photo, but both the 20+4pin cable and 4+4pin cables are the same length on both this be quiet E9 and the enermax Pro82+
However the enermax is shorter (140mm vs 160mm) and the modular connector means the 4+4pin is inset a short way from the edge.
When in a case with a lower mounted psu and the cable feed up behind the motherboard tray these two factors together combine to increase the overall length the cable has to travel by about 40mm (1.5”) so it seems shorter.
On any case larger than a mid tower this could well be a problem, in my opinion this cable need to be at least 50mm (2”) longer

A note on the braiding, you can see the way the enermax braiding stops far short of the connectors and is unbraided in the sections between connectors on chains, this is one area the be quiet E9 wins hands down, however on the braiding material itself the enermax stuff is nicer, however I don’t count that as a bad thing, I’ve never found any braiding that as nice as the enermax stuff, it’s so soft it feels like cotton, I really wish I knew what the material enermax uses for their braiding and where I could get some for when I do my own braiding, I’ve bought braiding from a few different sources and it’s just never been as good.
The overall braid quality on the be quiet is good, I’ve seen and used worse.

I’ll have to apologise in advance for the photos, my camera is struggling with all the black, so I’ve messed around with the levels a bit which has left them a bit grey and speckled.

Here we start off with the enermax pro82+ in my casecom 6788


You can see I’ve actually cut a small hole in the back of the motherboard tray to run the 4+4pin cable through so I can run it up the back.
The casecom 6788 is quite small for a “gaming” case, as it stands I’ve only got 2 of the hard drives plugged in because it’s just too hard to get the side panel back on with all the cable mess behind the drive cage with all 4 plugged in.

Let’s get the be quiet fitted

Just a quick and rough cable management job, I’ve left the two cables out that I didn’t use, then I realised I made a boob.
Because of the distance between hard drives and optical drive you cannot reach both with a single power cable, so you have to use two cables, the front fan in this case is powered by molex only (7v fan mod) so I needed a moles power cable too.
My boob, is that that cable on the right has both molex & sata connectors, so I could just of used that and one sata power cable, instead of 2 sata power cables and one molex power cable.


However I’ve still got it fairly neat, with the excess molex and sata cables stuffed underneath the hard drives, one thing you can see here is how much less slack there is on the 4+4pin cable compared to the enermax, this is all down to the psu being a bit longer and the cable starting that little bit farther from the edge.
One thing that this lead too is that you cannot mount the be quiet psu with the fan facing upwards and still run the 4+4pin cable round the back of the motherboard tray, which is a real shame, it would look so much better with that lovely grill and the embossed be quiet logo exposed to be shown off.
the sharp eyed of you will notice that I’ve not feed the 4+4pin through the hole I’d cut but instead through the cpu cutout, this is not because the cable wouldn’t reach but because the hole I cut is too small, I have to pass the connector through 4pin at a time and even then it’s a struggle so I really couldn’t be bothered.

Now let’s move this into something a bit bigger, bring out the HAF, ok it’s only a HAF 912+ so we’re going from a smaller mid tower to a larger mid tower but let’s see if it’ll still fit.

Sorry forgot to get a shot of the back, again I didn’t spend that long on the cable management, but yes the 4+4pin still fit round the back
It’s even tighter still compared to the casecom 6788 because the motherboard is raised up about 10mm higher from the top of the psu (which makes it far easier to plug in audio and usb headers)

You’ll notice that on both cases I don’t have the dvd drive in the top most bay, there’s a reason for this, as you always need to run a separate chain power cable up here I plug the first connector into the drive and then stuff the rest on top of the drive out of sight

Now for the voltages.
I forgot to take measurements on the enermax so I may have to revisit this, I’m also no electrical engineer so this is my understanding and simplifications.

We’ve also got a rail issue to contend with, ok now I know most psu’s don’t actually have separate 12v rails, they tend to be virtual rails.
This is something that was brought in with ATX 2.0 spec’s (and has since been removed in 2.3) the idea was to restrict the maximum current flowing down any one wire to 20a maximum, because any more than this and the wire starts overheating causing the insulation to melt and burst into flame.
It’s too expensive to current limit each individual wire so instead wires are grouped into “rails” all the current is still normally coming from the same source, ether a series or parallel group of, MOFETs or Schottky diodes, these (eventually) lead to the solder points on the pcb where the cables are soldered in (or in this case the modular connectors)
We also have a PWM controller chip that monitors and controls all this, this again is a safety thing, to make sure voltage stay within range, too much current is not pulled by any wire and such.
Each rail could have it’s own circuitry or use shared circuitry at any and all steps, which means the actual voltage numbers from one 12v rail might or might not be different from the actual voltage of any of the other 12v rails, add into this the modular system which again could have additional effects on the final numbers.
Now I’m mentioning this because I’m getting different numbers from the motherboard than I am from the multi meter.
I connected my multi meter to a molex, as I couldn’t see any handy voltage points on the motherboard itself (like there was on my old msi p55-gd65) and the fact that the motherboard is probably getting it’s numbers from the 20+4pin connector where as the molex is from the modular cables and are also on separate rails could be what’s leading to the differing numbers.
12v . . . 5v
12.097 . 5.014 Motherboard Asus monitor
12.24 . . 5.06 Multi meter via molex

I’ll try and do a bit more testing next week and also open it up to get a look inside.


“You call that cable management, bah! Now get this computer out of the way, I need this space for important things like sleeping.”

[UseItNow]

Good review mate, had actually somehow missed your review TBH, don't know how, so my apologies!

That GPU looks familiar LOL.

Enjoy the PSU, looks nice in the rig!

[Rob_B]

Ha I like how you used the two cables instead of the one sata/molex cable, I may have made that mistake myself before realising and #ahem# changing my review a little!

[Greecean]

quality of these are just superb!

look exactly like the new corsair hx redesigns as well

[Pob255]

Well I know I said I was going to open it up, but unless people really want me to I'm not going to bother, why? because jonnyguru has already done it and done it far better than I ever could http://www.jonnyguru.com/modules.php...Story&reid=269
I still might at some point just to confirm the capacitor make, I know for a while there was issues with supply of japanese capacitors and I know some people have open up their psu's to find non-japanese capacitors in psu's that claim japanese capacitors and reviews have shown japanese capacitors. It's happened on motherboards too, easier to get away with as identifying solid caps is harder to do.
I can see this as being a reason for the capacitor choice, not wanting to get caught short and get in trouble or it could be a simple cost cutting exercise, be quite! is still not the biggest or most well know of brands, saving a few $ per unit might seem small, but remember we're talking about the initial manufacturing costs, where units are being made in thousands and costs at the start of the products supply chain tend to multiply up the chain until you get to a final retail price (ie the whole path it takes from going from raw materials and components to the final retailer before you buy it) these costs can actually be up to 10 times or more. so saving $2 at one end could well reduce the retail price by $20

[dipzy]

Great review mate, BeQuite have great PSU's at affordable prices. May pick one up for a folding rig im building

[Behemoth]

That HAF 912+ looks familiar