be quiet! Straight Power 11 Platinum PSU review - Introduction

be quiet! Straight Power 11 Platinum (650 Watt) 
A premium power supply with platinum lining

We'll peek at a new be quiet! Straight Power 11 (650 Watt) PSU, the newly offered in a Platinum Edition. The ongoing series keeps getting updated and better. Revision 11 now thus offers an 80 Plus Platinum certified product series. The series has been fiddled and fooled around with and comes with some new tweaks, features and hey now, is an 80 Plus Platinum certified product series.

Efficiency wise in the year 2020 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 650 Watt PSU as tested today has an 80 Plus Platinum certification meaning at 50% load this puppy is 94% 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. You all 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, Straight 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).  

The 2020 edition Straight Power 11 Platinum you can spot on 550W, 650W, 750W, 850W, 1,000W and 1,200W capacities. We find it nice to see that models with platinum certification are now available as well as technology that is more difficult to achieve. All models make use of a really good 135mm Silent Wings 3 fan, it, however, will be active all the time, so even in a low load or idle state of the PC, that fan is active. However, it then spins at a very low 230 RPM, which basically cannot be heard. The all modular power supply will differ per PSU in terms of cables and connectors. You'll spot dual 4-pin for the processor, combined into a single 8-pin, and extra 8-pin is there as well, so you could even juice up a TRX40 motherboard (with two 8-pin CPU headers). And even our tested 650W model has four 12V rails. The 650W model as tested today carries a retail price of 139 EUR incl VAT / 134 USD.