Be Quiet! Dark Power Pro 11 1000W Power Supply Unit Review

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INTRODUCTION

The recent introduction of the new GeForce GTX 980 Ti graphics cards by NVIDIA and the Radeon R9 Fury graphics cards by AMD has "pushed" enthusiasts and serious gamers all around the world to also upgrade other parts of their systems most notably their power supply units. True these two card models are not the most power hungry ones in the market currently but they do require a good amount of power especially at load (roughly 300W for the GTX 980 Ti and 400W for the R9 Fury) and let's face it if you have enough money to get one or more of these cards you should also invest in a good power supply unit just for your peace of mind (that is if you don't already own one). Be Quiet! recently also updated their product catalog with their flagship Dark Power Pro 11 line of power supply units and for the past 2 weeks we've been using the 1000W model with exemplary results.



be quiet! is a premium brand manufacturer of power supplies and cooling solutions for your desktop PC. be quiet! products are convincing which is proved by reaching and defending the market leadership in PSU business in Germany for five consecutive years *. This is validated and accompanied by numerous awards for both power supplies and cooling solutions. be quiet! is awarded for five times in a row as manufacturer of the year in the power supply category by the readers of the well-known German hardware magazine PC Games Hardware. Another first and second rank in the categories “fans” and “cooler” underline the high acceptance of our products. be quiet! sticks to its name: Ten years’ experience in the field of noise reduction and silence make be quiet! products probably the most silent one on the market. Undoubted fans have a large impact of the noise levels of be quiet! products. Due we are using our specially developed Silent Wings fans in nearly all of our range. They are equipped with various noise reducing features. Thanks to these we ensure a really silent operation - our products reach the best balance between cooling performance and a virtually inaudible operation. If you choose be quiet! you can be sure to get premium quality and second to none silent operation from the quietness experts.



We've pretty much reviewed every PSU line be quiet! has released to date but the Dark Power Pro 11 1000W (peak output of almost 1170W) is in a class of its own since aside the 80 Plus Platinum efficiency certification it also features four +12V rails (2x32A & 2x40A) capable of delivering up to 996W, strong minor rails with a total output of 150W, overclocking key (can convert the four +12V rails onto a single +12V rail) 135mm SilentWings 3 PWM Fluid Dynamic Bearing fan, ErP 2014 support, EPS v2.92 support, ATX v2.4 support (Intel Haswell ready), Energy Star v6 support and a full set of electrical protections (OCP/OVP/UVP/SCP/OTP/OPP). Unfortunately the Dark Power Pro 11 doesn't feature a fully modular design like the Power Zone line of PSUs again by be quiet! but since fully modular models are known to perform slightly below their semi-modular brothers I’m sure that's why they followed this path.