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be quiet! power Zone power supply this particular one is 650 watt although it's
available in a variety of wattages and what is the point of the power zone line
you might ask well to deliver what would traditionally be very premium features
such as their silent Wings fan so very quiet cooling as well as a fully modular
interface 80 plus bronze certification
for its efficiency and all of that noise to a well a more reasonable price point
so let's go ahead and start opening this baby up a lot of their branding for this
power supply has to do with zones so the performance Zone they're using DC todc
conversion and a single 12vt rail cooling Zone you can actually cool up to
three different parts of your case using the thermal control and the power supply
with a built-in extension lead which I think is pretty darn cool connection
zone so full cable management or modularity quiet zone so it has 135 mm
silent Wings fan green zone so 80 plus bronze which is not that exceptional
these days I mean come on um and the safety zone so of course it has the full
SED of protections which you shouldn't take for granted to be perfectly honest
many power supplies even if they say they have them don't necessarily have
them implemented correctly and finally quality the capacitors internally are
rated for operation at 105° which means
that if they're operating at lower temperatures than that which they will unless you live in the desert and you
have your heat on in the house uh then the power supply will last for a very
long time and now that we've got it opened up we can have a look at what be
quiet includes with the unit so you've got your user manual which tells you
what other products you could have bought or well I mean they're just reusing the users manual for different
you know products you've also got a little sleeve that you will never put
your power supply back in ever because who would do that but you can use it for
other handy dandy little things like you know I don't know know tools or whatever
else I I usually hold on to these they're extremely useful you've got some
cable ties as well as screws these are longer extended screws which will become
apparent why you need those in just a moment as well as the full complement of
modular cables and don't worry they will include whatever is the actual
appropriate power cord for your region for you the only reason I got a European
one is because I got this uh sampled directly from be quiet! so let's start
with the PSU itself over here we've got
that 135 mm cooling fan on the bottom as
well as their very unique Aesthetics so it's a powder coat finished grill that
instead of having a you know a circular shape to it or whatever else just has a
very straight shape and I personally find looks quite striking it's similar
to what they have even on their higher end units like the dark Power Pro
they've also got a be quiet! logo that has that filled in sort of shiny color
resin thing going on with it looks quite nice as well so this is the side that
you would normally see from this angle when it's installed in your case or you
could flip it over the other way and you could see all the SA safety certifications and all that speaking of
safety certifications like I said before 648 watts of the 650 watt it can pump
out can all be done on the 12vt rail and it is a single 12volt rail so you're not
going to have to worry about accidentally plugging something into the wrong thing and accidentally triggering
the overcurrent protection on the back of the unit you find U again sort of a a
bit of a different aesthetic and that's the reason why you need those slightly
longer screws I personally don't prefer this approach I would have liked to see
the power supply just be you know a fraction of a centimeter shorter and
just use standard screws because this isn't rubber it's plastic so I don't
imagine that it's going to reduce the uh vibration that'll be transferred to the
case by the fan inside which would have maybe been the intention on the side we
find their power Zone branding as well as a stamped texture that I think looks
quite nice as well without being over the top I mean I think uh the last power
supply I saw with black and orange cables had black orange and white and
had like like an outlandish orange and silver color scheme on it and that I
didn't find as tasteful as something like this so now let's head on to the
business end of the power supply you've got two spots where you plug in the 20
pin or however many pins that is it's a split connector for the 24 pin as well
as up to three PCI Express cables that
can be plugged in two eight pin connectors can be plugged in with four
auxiliary connectors so that's Molex or SATA and finally there's those three fan
leads that you can use to control separate fans with the fan controller
that's built into the power supply one feature that it does have although I
personally don't see much of a value to it is that it can keep your fan spinning
even once your power supply is turned off so that or not once your power
supply is turned off once your PC is turned off so that components will cool
down even after you've shut down but when they're not running there's really
no danger of damage to the components so I personally don't worry about that too
much what it can be useful for is Hardcore benchmarking where you want to
keep the fans going to um not have any of the Subzero coolants cause you know
condensation on the the components or anything like that once it's turned off and it's not generating any heat anymore
then you can use those fans to to blow it away so there's something it could be
used for although I don't know how many hardcore benchmarkers are going to be
using power zones compared to dark Power Pros or something a little bit higher
end so what you might notice now that we have all of the cables plugged into the
power supplies there are actually still empty ports left so we have one
peripheral One open we have one PCI Express One open and we have one of
those 8 Pin CPU connectors open this is interesting to me because be quiet!
includes actually more ports than you need and fewer cables than fits in it
and I understand why this is only a 650 wat power supply each of those PCI
Express connectors supports two 6 plus two pins so that means you can run two
graphics cards natively off of this power supply and SLI or Crossfire but
you shouldn't be running three so even though it had three connector spots I
mean you shouldn't be doing that so they just include two cables so okay I get
that and then same thing goes for the eight pin so you've just got a single
eight pin reasonably long cable on here I like that you're going to be able to
reach in almost any case with that it's a it's a 4 plus4 you probably shouldn't
be using a 650 wat power supply and any kind of rig that would require two eight
pins and three PCIe 8 pins so there you
go okay so I kind of look at that and I go okay that's interesting you've got your 24 pin connector which is um about
average length which is good because when this one's too long it can just be
a cable management mess and then this is the one where I sort of scratch actually
no let's go with this first so next up we've got those custom cables where you
can plug them into the power supply and then those will lead to either Molex if
you prefer or to a three pin small fan
connector if you would prefer that totally up to you just make sure guys
that you don't plug this Molex into something that isn't a fan see it's
clearly labeled fan because it only has 12vt power it doesn't actually have an
additional ground and 5vt power so you don't want to risk damaging anything
next this is the one that made me scratch my head a little bit they only include three peripheral or drive
connector harnesses so one of them is purea four SATA connectors that's good
because that you can run over to your drive cages next up they've got this is
something B quiet does actually quite a good job of is sensible Arrangements of
the connectors on their cables so this one is two SATA and I would have
preferred to see SATA maybe a little bit further away from the power supply
itself here because your drive cages are sometimes a bit of a distance and then
two four pin molexes and then another one to match that except it also adds an
additional floppy so I would have liked to see one more
included but if you're not going to plug in more than I guess eight you know
drives and four auxiliary things plus a floppy connector then I guess it's not
really a huge issue for you and I guess with a 650 W power supply you probably
shouldn't I just like the way that with a lot of their units they give you a lot of options in terms of the cables you
can connect but of course you have to make compromises on the more value
oriented products and the fact that you're getting full modularity and all
those other great features makes it pretty compelling thank you for checking
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