Having reviewed and dissected almost a dozen ATX 3.0 power supplies in the last year, thus far we've seen an interesting mix in design pedigrees for PSUs targeting the newest power standard. For some manufacturers this has meant bringing up entirely new PSU designs by OEMs new and old, developing fresh platforms to accommodate the new 12VHPWR connector and its up to 600 Watt power limits. Meanwhile for other manufacturers, especially at the high end of the market, their existing PSU designs are so bulletproof that they've been able to add everything needed for ATX 3.0 compliance with only very modest changes.
For Be Quiet's flagship power supply lineup, the Dark Power Pro series, the company falls distinctly in to the second group. The pride and joy of Be Quiet!'s lineup has always been the pinnacle of the company’s engineering abilities, with the best possible specifications their engineers could muster (and equally prodigious price tags for the consumer). Besides making for long-lived PSUs themselves, that kind of engineering rigor has also allowed for a long-lived platform – even with the more extreme power delivery requirements brought about by ATX 3.0, Be Quiet has only needed to make a handful of changes to meet the new standard.
The result of those updates is the latest generation of the Dark Power Pro series, the Dark Power Pro 13, which we're looking at today. The 13th iteration of Be Quiet's lead PSU series builds upon their already impressive design for the Dark Power Pro 12, adding compliance with Intel’s ATX 3.0 design guide while retaining the 80Plus Titanium certification and impressive features of the previous version.
