 Buy an Intel NUC barebones PC and get a limited edition t-shirt and in-game items for planet side 2. Click now to learn more. Welcome to my unboxing of the Be Quiet PowerZone power supply. This particular one is 650 watt although it's available in a variety of wattages. And what is the point of the PowerZone line you might ask? Well to deliver what would traditionally be very premium features such as their silent wings fan so very quiet cooling as well as a fully modular interface, 80 plus bronze certification for its efficiency and all that noise to a well a more reasonable price point. So let's go ahead and start opening this baby up. A lot of their branding for this power supply has to do with zones. So the performance zone they're using DC to DC conversion in a single 12 volt rail. Cooling zone you can actually cool up to three different parts of your case using the thermal control and the power supply with a built in extension lead which I think is pretty darn cool. Connection zone so full cable management or modularity. Quiet zone so it has 135 millimeter silent wings fan. Green zone so 80 plus bronze which is not that exceptional these days. I mean come on. And safety zone so of course it has the full suite of protections which you shouldn't take for granted to be perfectly honest. Many power supplies even if they say they have them don't necessarily have them implemented correctly. And finally quality the capacitors internally are rated for operation at 105 degrees which means that if they're operating at lower temperatures than that which they will unless you live in the desert and you have your heat on in the house then the power supply will last for a very long time. And now that we've got it opened up we can have a look at what be a quiet includes with the unit. So you've got your user's manual which tells you what other products you could have bought or well I mean they're just reusing the user's manual for different you know products. You've also got a little sleeve that you will never put your power supply back in ever because who would do that. But you can use it for other handy dandy little things like you know I don't know tools or whatever else I I usually hold on to these they're extremely useful. You've got some cable ties as well as screws these are longer extended screws which will become apparent why you need those in just a moment as well as the full complement of modular cables and don't worry they will include whatever is the actual appropriate power cord for your region for you. The only reason I got a European one is because I got this sample directly from be quiet. So let's start with the PSU itself. Over here we've got that 135 millimeter cooling fan on the bottom as well as their very unique aesthetic. So it's a powder coat finished grill that instead of having a you know a circular shape to it or whatever else just has a very straight shape and I personally find looks quite striking it's similar to what they have even on their higher end units like the dark power pro. We've also got a be quiet logo that has that filled in sort of shiny color resin thing going on with it looks quite nice as well. So this is the side that you would normally see from this angle when it's installed in your case or you could flip it over the other way and you could see all the safety certifications and all that speaking of safety certifications like I said before 648 watts of the 650 watts it can pump out can all be done on the 12 volt rail and it is a single 12 volt rail so you're not going to have to worry about accidentally plugging something into the wrong thing and accidentally triggering the overcurrent protection. On the back of the unit you find again sort of a bit of a different aesthetic and that's the reason why you need those slightly longer screws. I personally don't prefer this approach I would have liked to see the power supply just be you know a fraction of a centimeter shorter and just use standard screws because this isn't rubber it's plastic so I don't imagine that it's going to reduce the vibration that will be transferred to the case by the fan inside which would have maybe been the intention. On the side we find their power zone branding as well as a stamped texture that I think looks quite nice as well without being over the top. I mean I think the last power supply I saw with black and orange cables had black orange and white and had like an outlandish orange and silver color scheme on it and that I didn't find as tasteful as something like this. So now let's head on to the business end of the power supply. You've got two spots where you plug in the 20 pin or however many pins that is it's a split connector for the 24 pin as well as up to three PCI Express cables that can be plugged in two 8 pin connectors can be plugged in with four auxiliary connectors so that's Molex or SATA and finally there's those three fan leads that you can use to control separate fans with the fan controller that's built into the power supply. One feature that it does have although I personally don't see much of a value to it is that it can keep your fan spinning even once your power supply is turned off so that or not once your power supply is turned off once your PC is turned off so that components will cool down even after you've shut down but when they're not running there's really no danger of damage to the components so I personally don't worry about that too much. What it can be useful for is hardcore benchmarking where you want to keep the fans going to not have any of the sub-zero coolants cause you know condensation on the components or anything like that once it's turned off and it's not generating any heat anymore then you can use those fans to blow it away so there's something it could be used for although I don't know how many hardcore benchmarkers are going to be using power zones compared to dark power pros or something a little bit higher end. So what you might notice now that we have all of the cables plugged into the power supply is there are actually still empty ports left so we have one peripheral one open we have one PCI express one open and we have one of those 8 pin CPU connectors open. This is interesting to me because Be Quiet includes actually more ports than you need and fewer cables than fits in it and I understand why this is only a 650 watt power supply. Each of those PCI express connectors supports two 6 plus 2 pins so that means you can run two graphics cards natively off of this power supply in SLR crossfire but you shouldn't be running three so even though it had three connector spots you shouldn't be doing that so they just include two cables so okay I get that and then same thing goes for the 8 pin so you've just got a single 8 pin reasonably long cable on here I like that you're going to be able to reach in almost any case with that. It's a 4 plus 4 you probably shouldn't be using a 650 watt power supply in any kind of rig that would require two 8 pins and three PCIe 8 pins so there you go okay so I kind of look at that and I go okay that's interesting you've got your 24 pin connector which is about average length which is good because when this one's too long it can just be a cable management mess and then this is the one where I sort of scratch actually no let's go with this first so next up we've got those custom cables where you can plug them into the power supply and then those will lead to either molex if you prefer or to a 3 pin small fan connector if you would prefer that totally up to you just make sure guys that you don't plug this molex into something that isn't a fan see it's clearly labeled fan because it only has 12 volt power it doesn't actually have an additional ground and 5 volt power so you don't want to risk damaging anything. Next this is the one that made me scratch my head a little bit they only include three peripheral or drive connector harnesses so one of them is pure SATA four SATA connectors that's good because that you can run over to your drive cages next up they've got this is something that be quiet does actually quite a good job of is sensible arrangements of the connectors on their cables so this one is two SATA and I would have preferred to see SATA maybe a little bit further away from the power supply itself here because your drive cages are sometimes a bit of a distance and then two 4 pin molexes and then another one to match that except it also adds an additional floppy so I would have liked to see one more cable included but if you're not going to plug in more than I guess eight you know drives and four auxiliary things plus a floppy connector then I guess it's not really a huge issue for you and I guess with a 650 watt power supply you probably shouldn't I just like the way that with a lot of their units they give you a lot of options in terms of the cables you can connect but of course you have to make compromises on the more value oriented products and the fact that you're getting full modularity and all those other great features makes it pretty compelling thank you for checking out my unboxing and overview of the be quiet power zone don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it and leave a comment telling me why you liked or disliked it because I actually do read them and I genuinely enjoy getting your feedback.