Photos and Features
It’s no surprise that the Dark Power 13 would be blacked out. It has a traditional sheet metal housing with a black finish and a heavy texture. When you have this bottom mounted and with the fan facing down as a majority of modern cases do, this is the side you will see. The styling is simple and clean with the textured background and for branding rather than have any color or resort to RGB lighting be quiet! has used chrome for the large Dark Power 13 logo across the side as well as the smaller be quiet! logo in the top corner. They don’t have the wattage shown here, but the simple styling gets the point across and should match any build, at least any build that has a black interior on the case.
The back side of the Dark Power 13 is where be quiet! has hidden away the information sticker. This has all of the certification logos as well as a breakdown of the power across the rails. This is also where you will find the serial number and barcode to go with it. Of course, because they put this here, if you need to bottom mount the PSU and have the fan facing inside this is the side you will see. With the sticker having a black background it isn’t too bad looking and it does still have the be quiet! branding and Dark Power 13 model information. But it doesn’t look as good as the chromed branding on the other side.
Being fully modular means that all of the cables can be disconnected, which also can make customizing your cables a lot easier as well. The Dark Power 13 850 Watt has all of its cable connections on the end and they have labeled everything as well both at the top and the bottom. In addition to that, each plug has a smaller label as well that shows the breakdown of what plug goes to each rail when running the Dark Power 13 in the default multi-rail mode. All of the peripheral cables on the left are on rail one. These have a compact 5-pin connection with the clip on the end not in the middle like we traditionally see. Then from there, both P8 plugs are for your CPU power connections and both are 10-pin connections running on rail two. Then in the middle, there are two PCIe 12-pin connections up top as well as the PCIe 5.0 cable aka the 12VHPWR connection at the bottom. The top plugs power two 8-pin cables each and each plug is on a different rail with the left on rail four and the right on rail 3. The 12VHPWR plug on the other hand connects to both the third rail and the fourth, they have also labeled it as 600 watts to make sure you know what it can handle. Some are rated lower so it is important to know. Then on the right, there are two motherboard plugs which both plug into the 24-pin cable, and on the PSU side have 20-pins on the larger plug and 8-pins on the smaller plug. Both run on rail one. Below that be quiet! has slipped in a small 3-pin connection, this is for the included overclock switch or jumper that will switch the Dark Power 13 from multi-rail to single rail.
The back side of the Dark Power 13 has two layers of sheet metal with the outside layer mostly being covered in wide vertical slots then through those, we can see the honeycomb holes in the sheet behind it. Then on the left, they do have the C13 power plug which supports 100-240 volts, and above that is the power switch. I’m surprised they didn’t also just build the overclock switch in here rather than using a PCI bracket or the jumper.
Where the Dark Power 13 stands out styling-wise is how they have covered up the fan side. While the rest of the housing is very traditional, they don’t have the wire grill cover or even the grill stamped out of the sheet metal. Be quiet! went with mesh with a large rectangle opening that covers everything but the edge. This leaves a lot of room for the 135mm be quiet! Silent Wings fan inside to move some air. This is where a company like be quiet has an advantage, their lineup of high-quality quiet fans means they can pull right from there, not go with any old off the shelf basic fan. The Silent Wing fan has a fluid dynamic bearing and when spun all the way up can reach up to 1800 RPM, but their breakdown of decibels in the spec sheet shows that the fan stays at its lowest setting from 10% up to 50% and then at 50% fan speed it moves from 7.5 dB up to 7.6 dB and then up to 19.8 dB at 100% load.
On the opposite side as the fan, the Dark Power 13 has nothing going on. You just have the metal housing with the textured black powder coat finish.
The Dark power 13 does come with a few accessories even without including the modular wires. The biggest thing here of course would be the power cable for the power supply itself. Being a US model it does have a NEMA5-15P plug on one end and the other end is the standard C13 plug. The cable also lets us know it is a 3x16 gauge wire with that stamped into the side. Beyond that, you get a small baggie with black mounting screws and a set of black thumb screws as well if you prefer doing things toolless. Be quiet! has also included a stack of branded Velcro wire straps and 6 small black wire ties to help with getting your wiring cleaned up. The Dark Power 13 comes with a PCI bracket with a small cable attached. This is a switch that allows you to manually switch between the multi-rail that it is in by default and single-rail mode for overclocking. They also include a smaller jumper plug if you want to keep it in the overclock mode all of the time without using the switch.
The Dark Power 13 doesn’t have the standard flat cables that a lot of power supplies have. They have gone with a more traditional full sleeving which looks great. I still prefer the flat cables when it comes to cleaning up the wiring, however. When be quiet! packed the wiring up they didn’t just bundle it all into one wire-tied bundle. They have all of the wiring split up into groups depending on the cable type and then have Velcro straps which are nicer than a wire tie and should be more durable when being reused.
With the change to ATX 3.0, this does mean that the GPU power cable setup has changed. The 850-watt Dark Power 13 that I’m checking out comes with two cables in total but one of the two is really more like two cables. You have the new 12VHPWR cable which is 23 inches long. If you haven’t seen this connection before you will be surprised at the smaller connection which you can see in the picture below with the older 8-pins sitting next to it. The new connection is a single connection with 12 standard plugs and four sensor cables on the side. While more compact the cable is designed to feed up to 600 watts which means you only need the one cable. The second cable is a Y cable with two 6+2 connections. Rather than the standard setup which daisy chains the second PCIe plug right off of the first, this gives each plug the full length of cable and a direct connection at the PSU to better handle power with a 12-pin connection at the PSU. This configuration gives you the flexibility for either option or to feed more power into a motherboard if needed as those sometimes have 6-pin connections. The Dark Power 13 does come with a second dual 8-pin cable, which comes bundled with the 24-pin cable. Both PCIe cables are slightly longer than the 12VHPWR cable at 24 inches long.
For the rest of the modular cables on the Dark Power 13, the first bundle had the second PCIe cable that I already mentioned as well as the 24-pin motherboard power cable. This is 24 inches long and being the biggest cable does have a bigger sleeving than the rest of the cables. The second bundle has two CPU power cables. These are both 28 inches long to help reach that top left corner. One cable has a 4+4 pin setup for those motherboards that have a 4-pin connection. Then the second CPU power is a standard 8-pin. Both have the P8 connections on the Dark Power 13 which are 10-pin connections on the PSU side of the cable. From there we have two more bundles of cables, both with peripheral cables. One bundle comes with SATA power cables which both have three SATA connections at 23, 29, and 35 inches along the cable. The second bundle of peripheral cables has two unique cables. The top cable in the bottom picture is all SATA connection but this time around with four with plugs at 24, 33, 39, and 44 inches. The last cable has a mix of Molex and SATA power plugs. There are four plugs with the first two as SATA and the last two as Molex.
