be quiet! Dark Power Pro 12 (1500W) PSU Review

Testing – With a Few Problems…

If you’re familiar with our usual power supply testing methodology, you’ll know that usually our process is exceptionally thorough looking into all of the key and important aspects of how the power is delivered. Ripple, efficiency, OPP, maximum wattage output etc. With the be quiet! Dark Power Pro 12, however, we encountered a bit of a problem.

As this is a more ‘industrial’ style PSU, it does not have a standard power in adaptor and, as such, we couldn’t hook this up to our test bench. No test bench, no fancy charts and masses of interesting results to mull over. So, what did we do? Well, lacking any better solution, we decided to simply hook this up to our test bench system, fire up the overclocking settings, and see how this would operate at the maximum power output we could muster.

When attached to our test bench, we found that the be quiet! Dark Power Pro 12 performed its task admirably and, perhaps most notable, even when we tried to make as much demands of its 1500 watts as we could, the fan was barely audible. While I couldn’t 100% confirm it’s design (due to the manner in which this PSU has been assembled), I would not be surprised if it was one of their ‘Silent Wing’ models.

As we said earlier in the review though, this power supply has not been primarily designed for standard PC systems. It’s definitely better suited for workstation and extreme overclocking builds. From our somewhat limited testing, however, we can confirm that it worked perfectly and, on a more basic level, did it’s job while barely making a whisper!