Be Quiet Dark Power Pro 12

Be Quiet! is a High german manufacturer that mainly produces PC cases, power supply units (PSUs), and cooling-related products. Equally the company's name suggests, their products are designed with quiet functioning primarily in mind. The visitor is no stranger to the N American markets, slowly but steadily increasing its presence over the last few years. Their delivery to continue to increment their presence in the Us became apparent with the recent founding of a US-based service eye in California for seamless afterward-sales support.

Be Quiet!'south main market focus currently lies with PC PSUs, with the visitor offering more than three dozen different designs split under eight different series. Although most of their products are targeted toward mainstream users, and are consequently designed to exist counterbalanced between toll-effectiveness and performance, the company is broadening its product ranges every few months, offering some impressive high-terminate designs to round out their product lineups.

In today's review, we are taking a look at the pinnacle of Be Serenity!'s PSU design efforts, the Dark Ability Pro 12 1500W (BN647). The Nighttime Ability Pro has a long list of features, the highlights of which are the 80Plus Titanium efficiency rating, the patented Silent Wings cooling fan, and the monstrous 1500 Watts continuous (and 1600 Watts peak) output, which are counterbalanced by a colossal $450 cost tag. Be Quiet! clearly is aiming to accept on the halo products of the few renowned manufacturers that released >i.five kW products in the past couple of years, setting a very high bar for our expectations.

Dark Ability Pro 12 1500W Ability specifications ( Rated @ l °C )
AC INPUT	100 - 240 VAC, fifty - 60 Hz
Rails	+3.3V	+5V	+12V (combined)	+5Vsb	-12V
MAX OUTPUT	25A	25A	125A	3.5A	0.5A
MAX OUTPUT	150W		1500W	17.5W	6W
Total	1500W

Packaging and Bundle

Be Quiet! supplies the Dark Power Pro 12 1500W PSU in a big, sturdy, and externally aesthetically minimalistic paper-thin box. Despite its simplistic advent, the packaging is very sturdy and of loftier quality. Practically nothing is printed at the front of the box but enough of details can be found on the sides and rear.

A rich bundle tin be establish inside the box, as expected from a halo production such equally this. Within the box we constitute the standard AC ability cablevision, four typical mounting screws and 4 thumbscrews for the user to select whichever they adopt, x cable straps, a few cable ties, wire combs, and a PCI slot switch. The PCI slot switch can exist used to turn the "overclocking" mode on and off. When off, the PSU has multiple virtual 12V runway, monitoring them for overcurrent individually. When overclocking fashion is on, information technology monitors the entire 12V line as a single rail, preventing the PSU from shutting downwardly when a single connector draws a little scrap too much power. The catch is that the latter way cannot discern unmarried-wire disquisitional faults and such a fault could pb to a massive electric current over a single wire, irreversibly damaging it.

The Night Power Pro 12 is a fully modular design, allowing for the removal of every DC power cable, including the 24-pin ATX connector. All of the cables are blackness, with blackness connectors and individually sleeved wires. Nosotros also found not one but two floppy disk power adapters within the packaging, an agreeable but very odd thing for such a product in 2021.

Dark Ability Pro 12
Connector type	Hardwired	Modular
ATX 24 Pin	-	1
EPS four+4 Pin	-	1
EPS 8 Pin	-	1
PCI-Due east 6+ii Pin	-	10
PCI-E 8 Pivot	-	-
SATA	-	16
Molex	-	8
Floppy	-	ii

The Be Quiet! Dark Power Pro 12 1500W PSU

External Appearance

The Be Quiet! Night Power Pro 12 is visually imposing, featuring a unique layered chassis. The exterior is almost entirely black, with very smooth brushed surfaces and sharp edges. The chassis is very long, measuring 200 mm deep, which makes information technology incompatible with a large number of smaller cases, but this shouldn't be an issue for the kind of large computers where you'll need (and be able to cool) 1kW to begin with.

Chrome fonts form the series and company logos on one side of the unit. The other side is covered by a sticker with the unit'south electrical specifications and certifications. The top side of the chassis is well-nigh perfectly clean, with the small exception of the warranty sticker. A massive on/off switch can be seen at the rear side of the unit of measurement, right beneath the IEC C19 connector, which was required considering the high electric current depict when the PSU needs to be powered from a 115V AC source.

The front side of the Dark Ability Pro 12 is filled to the brim with the connectors for the modular cables. Exist Quiet! is using a straight 5-pin connector for the SATA/Molex cables, dual row 10-pin cables for the CPU cables, and dual row 12-pin connectors for the PCIe cables. The ATX cable connects to two connectors at the PSU'south side, a large xx-pin connector, and a second 8-pin connector. The printed legend indicates which virtual 12 V rail corresponds to every connector. Even though each group consists of physically identical connectors, users should be conscientious non to connect the cables randomly but every bit recommended in the manual, because the default manner of the Dark Power Pro 12 is with multiple 12V OCP rails, meaning that the PSU will shut downward if the load is improperly counterbalanced.

Internal Design

We unremarkably find Be Quiet! using their own fans to absurd their PSUs, and the Night Ability Pro 12 is no exception, using a Silent Wings 135 mm fan under the finger guard. The simply difference here is that the Dark Power Pro 12 is using a frameless version of the fan. This design supposedly reduces the intensity of the vibrations and increases airflow, just there is a downside to it – if the fan ever fails, finding a replacement will exist a challenge for anyone but the manufacturer. The maximum speed of the 135 mm fluid-dynamic begetting (FDB) fan is 2600 RPM, an extremely high speed for a fan of this size.

Be Placidity! employs several OEMs for the pattern and production of their PSUs. The OEM behind the creation of the Nighttime Power Pro 12 is Channel-Well Technologies, or CWT. Many experienced enthusiasts might accept guessed that sooner past the presence of the multiple virtual 12V lines, a pattern tactic oft employed on their platforms.

The platform that the Dark Power Pro 12 can be a very interesting give-and-take and inquiry topic. Information technology is not a fully digital platform, simply rather information technology'southward a hybrid. Specifically, it uses digital controllers on the critical parts and analog controllers on the secondary runway that derive from DC-to-DC converters.

Diving deeper, there was nil special regarding the filtering stage, which comprises a total of six Y capacitors, two Ten capacitors, and two filtering inductors leading to a dual input rectifying span configuration. The bridges do non have their ain heatsink merely are attached to a large heatsink that holds most of the agile chief side components. There are not one, not 2, simply three APFC capacitors to cope with the massive power requirements of the unit. 2 capacitors are made by Nichicon and one is supplied by Nippon Chemi-Con.

Four transistors grade a full-bridge inversion topology at the primary side of the unit. There are two transformers only a unmarried output, most likely because there was no room for a single transformer that was powerful enough – or a single transformer powerful enough that could fit in this design was besides expensive. The twelve MOSFETs that generate the 12V rail on the secondary side are all attached on vertical daughterboards with their own heatsinks.

The 3.3V and 5V lines are being generated via the DC-to-DC conversion circuits found on the vertical PCB near the front of the unit. All of the secondary lines, including the 5VSB line, are governed by an analog controller. In that location are numerous electrolytic and polymer capacitors to be seen in the Dark Power Pro 12. Nichicon, Rubycon, and Nippon Chemi-Con supply the electrolytic capacitors, while FPCAP and United Chemi-Con supply all of the polymer capacitors. And although five different capacitor suppliers are involved in the creation of this specific PSU, all of them are renowned for their high-quality products.

Cold Exam Results (~22°C Ambience)