be quiet! Dark Power Pro 13 1600w ATX 3.0 80 PLUS Titanium PSU Review

TweakTown's Rating: 98%

The Bottom Line

be quiet! has released its Dark Power Pro 13 1600w ATX 3.0 PSU, and it's a behemoth of a PSU. Locked and loaded with a 80 PLUS Titanium efficiency rating and a price tag under $500, this is the ATX 3.0 PSU to get if you need tons of juice.

Pros

• 80 PLUS Titanium rating
• Mostly individually sleeved cables
• Two 600w 12VHPWR cables
• Beautiful presentation & robust design
• Priced very aggressively compared to the competition

Cons

• Cable combs are a bit fussy

Should you buy it?

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Introduction, Specifications, and Pricing

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Here we have be quiet!'s newest PSU offering, the Dark Power Pro 13, particularly the 1600w model. This ATX 3.0 PSU is no joke and even had an 80 Plus Titanium rating to back it up. The Dark Power Pro series is known for being built like a tank and can handle the heaviest loads.

Pricing puts the Dark Power Pro 13 1600w PSU on Amazon for $459.99, which is quite a bit cheaper than its competition. So let's take a closer look at why this PSU is so good.

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Packaging

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The packaging is what you would expect for such a high-end PSU from a reputable company like be quiet!. The sleeve outside the box shows specifications and a QR code for the full rundown of the Dark Power Pro 13 1600w ATX 3.0 PSU.

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Taking the sleeve off, then removing the top section of the box reveals some particular attention to detail. On the right-hand side is all the cabling neatly tucked away inside. The left-hand side is the star of the show, the Dark Power Pro 13 1600w ATX 3.0 PSU, which has a protective cloth sleeve wrapped around the exterior.

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The included accessories be quiet! has chosen to fit with the Dark Power Pro 13 1600w and rounds out the PSU nicely. Starting with a full assortment of cable combs, the OCK harness PCI slot cover bracket, hex head Phillips screws, large thumbscrews, a few zip ties, and a ton of be quiet!-branded cable straps.

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With all the cables removed from the box from which they came, every cable, except for the two 12VHPWR cables, is individually sleeved. Attention to these details here, which only sometimes would include individually sleeved cables be included, most of the time third-party manufacturers like CableMod fill that gap in the market.

Outside the be quiet! Dark Power Pro 13 1600w ATX 3.0 PSU

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Removing the Dark Power Pro 13 1600w PSU from its protective cloth shows a brushed metal finish on both sides, along with the model number, and be quiet! branding in a chrome finish. This PSU is built like a tank, and it shows.

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The business side of the Dark Power Pro 13 1600w PSU is filled to the gills with cable inputs. Starting with the left-hand side, a bank of six inputs labeled DRIVES runs on the 12V1 rail, which gives power to the HDDs, SSDs, and peripherals. The next input, quite popular for be quiet!, is the OCK input, which allows for a switch to be installed in a PCI slot, allowing the user to create one large single 12V rail for much better stability for overclocking.

Directly under and to the right of the OCK input are the two split motherboard connections in a 20 by 8-pin configuration. Under the 8-pin motherboard input are two P8 CPU cable inputs, which run on the second 12V rail by default. PCIe power is split between two additional 12V rails, 12V3 and 12V4. Lastly, the two inputs for the two PCIe 5.0 12VHPWR 600-watt cables, each with their 12V rail, were labeled 12V5 and 12V6, respectively.

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This side shows all the terminology of the Dark Power Pro 13 1600w PSU. Again notice that there are six 12V rails, with the last two rails receiving 55a of juice each. Just insane.

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The power input side has a large on/off rocker switch and the large and in charge heavy-duty rectangular shaped NEMA 5-15P to IEC 60320 C19 cable that measures just over 4 feet in total length. The Dark Power Pro 13 1600w is also rated to run 100-240Vac.

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And before we crack open the Dark Power Pro 13 1600w PSU, let's take a second to appreciate the mesh fan intake for the 135mm fan. Overall I love this approach that be quiet! uses on its line of Dark Power Pro PSUs.

Inside the be quiet! Dark Power Pro 13 1600w ATX 3.0 PSU

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Like the other Dark Power models before it, the Dark Power Pro 13 includes two shroud pieces that aid in directing the airflow to the parts of the PSU that need it the most, most importantly, the three high-quality Japanese capacitors.

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The fan inside the be quiet! Dark Power Pro 13 1600w is none other than a be quiet! fan measuring 135mm and capable of spinning up to 2600 RPM with only .56A of juice. This version uses a frameless version of the already capable Silent Wings 3 fan.

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An overall top-down view of the Dark Power Pro 13 1600w. A very clean layout with the OEM being from CWT, aka Channel Well Technology. This layout is very well built and consists of three high-quality 105C Japanese capacitors from Nippon Chemi-Con. Also, the two large transformers are in a parallel configuration instead of the traditional single transformer configuration, offering higher efficiency and increased performance.

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Here are the three high-quality 105C Japanese capacitors, rated at 400v with 680 microfarads each, while the smaller one is rated at 400v with 470 microfarads. Totaling up the caps results in 1,830 microfarads.

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A very clean design layout aids in the DC-DC converters responsible for the smaller rails. Also, two semiconductor FETs sit right in front, which generates a clean +12V rail.

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Lastly, the large black heatsink removes the heat generated by the MOSFETs that are part of the PFC or the Power Factor Corrector module.

Ryan's Test System

• Motherboard: B650 AORUS Elite AX (AMD B650) - Buy from Amazon
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X - Buy from Amazon
• Cooler: Arctic Freezer II 360mm AIO - Buy from Amazon
• Memory: Patriot Viper Venom RGB DDR5-5600 32GB - Buy from Amazon
• Graphics Card: NVIDIA RTX 3090 Founders Edition - Buy from Amazon
• Storage: Corsair MP600 PRO XT Gen4 PCIe x4 NVMe M.2 SSD - Buy from Amazon
• Case: Phanteks NV7 - Buy from Amazon
• Software: AIDA64 Engineer 6.32.5600, and CPU-z 1.94.0 x64
• Power Supply: be quiet! Dark Power Pro 13 1600w ATX 3.0 - Buy from Amazon
• OS: Microsoft Windows 11 Pro 64-bit Build 22621 - Buy from Amazon
• Software: AIDA64 Engineer 6.8.6300, and CPU-z 2.03.0 x64

Testing & Final Thoughts

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So how well did be quiet! 's Dark Power Pro 13 1600w perform? Well, as expected, it handled everything like a boss. For the test machine, which consists of an NVIDIA RTX 3090 FE and an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X CPU, I decided to strap in a second RTX 3090, a Zotac RTX 3090 Trinity, to be exact. Running Aida64's System Stability Test for over 24 hours was a good stress test to ensure extreme stability; this generated a higher wattage load that netted just about 762 watts when every component was fully loaded.

Looking at how much power was drawn from the socket, the KillaWatt P3 reported around 800 watts. Simple math places the Dark Power Pro 13 1600w at just above 95% efficiency at a 50% load, giving the 80 Plus Titanium rating room to spare. Also, the Silent Wings 3 135mm fan was inaudible throughout testing.

Consumers must consider their PSU when upgrading other high-wattage components like a GPU or CPU. Good clean power is essential for a system to perform as well as it can. An unstable PSU can cause random power-on failures, sporadic rebooting, infrequent lockups, or even full-on system failure, such as a blown PSU. An unstable PSU could even send power spikes into the rest of the PC, killing critical system components.

Now priced at $459.99 at most retailers, it puts the Dark Power Pro 13 1600w PSU into a higher tier of the customer base. The Dark Power Pro 1600w PSU is in a class by itself currently. Sure, dropping the 80 Plus rating down to Platinum gets a few more contenders, namely the Seasonic Prime PX-1600; however, it retails for around $560, which is hundred dollars more for essentially a less efficient ATX 3.0 PSU.

I previously reviewed be quiet! 's Dark Power 12 850w ATX 3.0 PSU, which I thought was one of its class's best ATX 3.0 PSUs. Well, it seems that be quiet! has done it again with their Dark Power Pro 13 1600w. Features like the 80 Plus Titanium rating, full individual-sleeved cables with cable combs, and two 600-watt 12VHPWR power connectors for hungry GPUs feel premium. If you are in the market for a great ATX 3.0 PSU over 1200 watts with an 80 Plus Titanium rating, look no further, the Dark Power Pro 13 1600w is the one you should be looking at.