Welcome to my review of the Be Quiet! Straight Power 12 850W power supply. This power supply has an 80 PLUS® certification which means it can be up to 94% efficient.
It supports ATX 3.0 and has full support for PCIe 5.0 GPUs (i.e Nvidia RTX 4xxx 12 PIN) and GPUs with the older 6+2 pin connection.
Please note I have updated this review to reflect an update I received post publishing the write up.
Massive Power, Massive Efficiency.
So, I’ve already mentioned a few things about what this power supply supports. The fact you can get all of what it supports for under £200 mesmerises me. The likes of Asus, Seasonic, and Thermaltake have power supplies with higher price points and they’re only gold-rated. I say only, gold is still brilliant, but this one is platinum rated meaning it’s more efficient.
The Hardware
In the box, we have the power supply, a bunch of braided cables, a short and sweet guide, and of course the European power plug for my UK connection… wait, that’s not right? – No it’s not.
This is the only downside and I think it’s because I was sent a review unit straight from Germany. Of course, for a UK buyer, I would like to think you would receive an actual UK plug.
This was more an annoyance than an issue for me though because I have spares. But, that’s not the point. As an update to this, I have been informed that this was not an error on the part of Be Quiet! – So consumers would receive the correct cable for the region they are buying in.
As you can see in the picture above, we have lots of options of cable to plug into the power supply. One of which is a PCIe 5.0 cable which can support up to 600W on its own. This is the cable you need if you’re planning to pair this PSU with an Nvidia RTX 4xxx series GPU. However, I am out of the loop and I’m not 100% sure on which cables the latest AMD graphics cards need. But I imagine this PSU will have the right cable for you.
Lots of Options
There are also a load of other cables for things like SATA-powered devices, your CPU power, 24-pin motherboard power, graphics cards, and even Molex. Yes Molex, remember that on the older PATA HDDs? If not, go look it up and look at the beast of a connection including the older IDE data cable.
As you can see, there are a lot of ports to connect stuff into, any modern-day gamer should be able to use this power supply for their setup. Just make sure to double-check your power requirements as if you have some higher-end stuff like an RTX 4090 you may need to go choose a higher wattage option of the Straight Power. However, there are many options of this – 750W, 850W, 1000W, 1200W, and 1500W.
So to add to the above, I do love that this power supply is silent. I have not heard a noise from it at all, even when the fan decides to have a little spin around. No coil whine, no high-pitched noises of any sort. Unlike my Corsair RM850e PSU that I had in my PC previous to this. That thing had some bad coil whine at times.
Key Features
- 80 PLUS Platinum efficiency (up to 94%)
- ATX 3.0 PSU with full support for PCIe 5.0 GPUs and GPUs with 6+2 pin connectors
- Handles massive power excursions
- Virtually inaudible Silent Wings 135mm fan
- Funnel-shaped fan opening on PSU case for high airflow intake
- Full bridge LLC technology for unmatched signal stability
Conclusions
Overall I feel that this power supply is top-tier. But, not only is this an 80 PLUS Platinum-rated power supply, I feel that the price is very fair too. At the time of writing, this can be bought from Overclockers UK for £175.
I score the Be Quiet! Straight Power 12 850W a 9/10 10/10.
The reason for this is I was sent a European plug and not a UK plug in the box… Not the end of the world as I had spare.
I have updated my review to 10/10 (from 9/10) as I was informed that receiving a European plug was not a fault of Be Quiet! Therefore, this review is now the highest score we can give. You can learn more about this power supply on their website.
A sample was kindly provided for us to review this product.
