be quiet! Pure Power 11 (600 Watt) PSU review - Introduction

be quiet! Pure Power 11 (600 Watt) PSU
Pure gold?

In this review, we check out the be quiet! Pure Power 11 Watt PSU. The ongoing series keeps getting updated and better. Revision 11 now is 80 Plus Gold certified product series. With the ever-growing popularity of efficient and silent power supplies, this is a modular unit with two 12V rails (for this 600-watt model). The Pure Power series now has reached revision 11 already and bq quiet! submitted the new 600 Watt revision power supply. The series has been fiddled and fooled around with and comes with some new tweaks, features and hey now, is an 80 Plus Gold certified product series.

Efficiency wise in the year 2018 things just do not matter that much anymore, we have seen most power supplies move upwards into the realm of gold towards platinum as well, everything else is already invented. So the only thing left is efficiency and making the best quality PSU your money can get you. The 600 Watt PSU as tested today has an 80 Plus Gold certification meaning at 50% load this puppy is 92% efficient (at 230V). Bronze, Silver is the more affordable units, but truthfully Gold or Platinum and Titanium is what you want, that upper stack in hardware is more expensive though. The age of dull beige painted PCs had to go. We wanted nicely shaped, cooled and preferably lit PCs with side windows so we could actually look at the inside of the PC. Really cool to look at but that created another issue. We now had the beautiful looking cases where you could look inside, but that resulted in pulling the hairs out of your head as there were yellow, red, and black wires coming from the PSU everywhere. So the power supply received another function; aesthetics. It needs to look nice. By organizing cables and by giving you the option to actually choose the wires you want to use, another problem was solved. We call it cable management these days. Sound levels coming from your PSU; the high rated PSUs typically have one fan and up to a few years ago a lot of manufacturers did not pay attention to all that noise, then... I have to say it, the Pure Power 11 is one of the more silent products we've ever tested. For Be Quiet! the third factor was utilizing silent high-performance fans preferably with smart-fan technology (variable fan speeds based on heat).  

be quiet! has tweaked a thing or two, the move from silver to gold 80Plus certification, an even lower noise level, additional heatsinks and an increased warranty from 3, now running 5-years. These units aren't that expensive either, the 600W model as tested today carries a retail price of 85 EUR incl VAT / 75 USD.