be quiet! Power Zone Power Supply Unboxing & Overview
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
1,882 words · ~9 min read
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buy an Intel knock barebones PC and get a limited edition t-shirt and in-game
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items for Planet Side 2 click now to learn more welcome to my unboxing of the
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be quiet! power Zone power supply this particular one is 650 watt although it's
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available in a variety of wattages and what is the point of the power zone line
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you might ask well to deliver what would traditionally be very premium features
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such as their silent Wings fan so very quiet cooling as well as a fully modular
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interface 80 plus bronze certification
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for its efficiency and all of that noise to a well a more reasonable price point
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so let's go ahead and start opening this baby up a lot of their branding for this
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power supply has to do with zones so the performance Zone they're using DC todc
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conversion and a single 12vt rail cooling Zone you can actually cool up to
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three different parts of your case using the thermal control and the power supply
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with a built-in extension lead which I think is pretty darn cool connection
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zone so full cable management or modularity quiet zone so it has 135 mm
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silent Wings fan green zone so 80 plus bronze which is not that exceptional
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these days I mean come on um and the safety zone so of course it has the full
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SED of protections which you shouldn't take for granted to be perfectly honest
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many power supplies even if they say they have them don't necessarily have
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them implemented correctly and finally quality the capacitors internally are
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rated for operation at 105° which means
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that if they're operating at lower temperatures than that which they will unless you live in the desert and you
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have your heat on in the house uh then the power supply will last for a very
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long time and now that we've got it opened up we can have a look at what be
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quiet includes with the unit so you've got your user manual which tells you
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what other products you could have bought or well I mean they're just reusing the users manual for different
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you know products you've also got a little sleeve that you will never put
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your power supply back in ever because who would do that but you can use it for
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other handy dandy little things like you know I don't know know tools or whatever
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else I I usually hold on to these they're extremely useful you've got some
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cable ties as well as screws these are longer extended screws which will become
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apparent why you need those in just a moment as well as the full complement of
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modular cables and don't worry they will include whatever is the actual
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appropriate power cord for your region for you the only reason I got a European
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one is because I got this uh sampled directly from be quiet! so let's start
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with the PSU itself over here we've got
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that 135 mm cooling fan on the bottom as
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well as their very unique Aesthetics so it's a powder coat finished grill that
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instead of having a you know a circular shape to it or whatever else just has a
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very straight shape and I personally find looks quite striking it's similar
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to what they have even on their higher end units like the dark Power Pro
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they've also got a be quiet! logo that has that filled in sort of shiny color
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resin thing going on with it looks quite nice as well so this is the side that
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you would normally see from this angle when it's installed in your case or you
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could flip it over the other way and you could see all the SA safety certifications and all that speaking of
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safety certifications like I said before 648 watts of the 650 watt it can pump
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out can all be done on the 12vt rail and it is a single 12volt rail so you're not
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going to have to worry about accidentally plugging something into the wrong thing and accidentally triggering
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the overcurrent protection on the back of the unit you find U again sort of a a
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bit of a different aesthetic and that's the reason why you need those slightly
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longer screws I personally don't prefer this approach I would have liked to see
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the power supply just be you know a fraction of a centimeter shorter and
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just use standard screws because this isn't rubber it's plastic so I don't
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imagine that it's going to reduce the uh vibration that'll be transferred to the
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case by the fan inside which would have maybe been the intention on the side we
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find their power Zone branding as well as a stamped texture that I think looks
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quite nice as well without being over the top I mean I think uh the last power
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supply I saw with black and orange cables had black orange and white and
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had like like an outlandish orange and silver color scheme on it and that I
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didn't find as tasteful as something like this so now let's head on to the
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business end of the power supply you've got two spots where you plug in the 20
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pin or however many pins that is it's a split connector for the 24 pin as well
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as up to three PCI Express cables that
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can be plugged in two eight pin connectors can be plugged in with four
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auxiliary connectors so that's Molex or SATA and finally there's those three fan
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leads that you can use to control separate fans with the fan controller
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that's built into the power supply one feature that it does have although I
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personally don't see much of a value to it is that it can keep your fan spinning
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even once your power supply is turned off so that or not once your power
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supply is turned off once your PC is turned off so that components will cool
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down even after you've shut down but when they're not running there's really
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no danger of damage to the components so I personally don't worry about that too
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much what it can be useful for is Hardcore benchmarking where you want to
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keep the fans going to um not have any of the Subzero coolants cause you know
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condensation on the the components or anything like that once it's turned off and it's not generating any heat anymore
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then you can use those fans to to blow it away so there's something it could be
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used for although I don't know how many hardcore benchmarkers are going to be
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using power zones compared to dark Power Pros or something a little bit higher
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end so what you might notice now that we have all of the cables plugged into the
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power supplies there are actually still empty ports left so we have one
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peripheral One open we have one PCI Express One open and we have one of
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those 8 Pin CPU connectors open this is interesting to me because be quiet!
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includes actually more ports than you need and fewer cables than fits in it
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and I understand why this is only a 650 wat power supply each of those PCI
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Express connectors supports two 6 plus two pins so that means you can run two
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graphics cards natively off of this power supply and SLI or Crossfire but
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you shouldn't be running three so even though it had three connector spots I
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mean you shouldn't be doing that so they just include two cables so okay I get
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that and then same thing goes for the eight pin so you've just got a single
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eight pin reasonably long cable on here I like that you're going to be able to
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reach in almost any case with that it's a it's a 4 plus4 you probably shouldn't
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be using a 650 wat power supply and any kind of rig that would require two eight
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pins and three PCIe 8 pins so there you
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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
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average length which is good because when this one's too long it can just be
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a cable management mess and then this is the one where I sort of scratch actually
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no let's go with this first so next up we've got those custom cables where you
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can plug them into the power supply and then those will lead to either Molex if
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you prefer or to a three pin small fan
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connector if you would prefer that totally up to you just make sure guys
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that you don't plug this Molex into something that isn't a fan see it's
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clearly labeled fan because it only has 12vt power it doesn't actually have an
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additional ground and 5vt power so you don't want to risk damaging anything
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next this is the one that made me scratch my head a little bit they only include three peripheral or drive
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connector harnesses so one of them is purea four SATA connectors that's good
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because that you can run over to your drive cages next up they've got this is
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something B quiet does actually quite a good job of is sensible Arrangements of
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the connectors on their cables so this one is two SATA and I would have
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preferred to see SATA maybe a little bit further away from the power supply
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itself here because your drive cages are sometimes a bit of a distance and then
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two four pin molexes and then another one to match that except it also adds an
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additional floppy so I would have liked to see one more
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included but if you're not going to plug in more than I guess eight you know
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drives and four auxiliary things plus a floppy connector then I guess it's not
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really a huge issue for you and I guess with a 650 W power supply you probably
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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
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can connect but of course you have to make compromises on the more value
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oriented products and the fact that you're getting full modularity and all
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those other great features makes it pretty compelling thank you for checking
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out my unboxing and overview of the be quiet! power Zone don't forget to subscribe to Li Detective more unboxings
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