be quiet! SFX L Power 500w Gold Power Supply Review

Testing

As we stated earlier, this power supply uses a rather strange way to get the power to your components. By piggy-backing the 24-pin cable it, of course, can keep cables to a minimum and quite well organized. Unfortunately, however, our tester simply didn’t want to cooperate with the way the be quiet! SFX L Power has been designed. We, therefore, did the next best thing and connected it up to our system. From this, we ran a benchmarking software program for about an hour to put it through its paces.

As this is clearly no kind of testing method, you will not see any of our usual tables and charts. At eTeknix we pride ourselves on our testing thoroughness, we have even been commended on multiple occasions by manufacturers and their partners for our efforts in this regard, but this simply doesn’t meet our own standards.

So, what can we say about the be quiet! SFX L Power? Well, firstly, it worked. That’s generally a good start.

Testing on an actual real-world machine!

During the benchmark testing, we found that the power supply presented no issues and quite happily ran our system without any drama. Noise levels were practically non-existent and the fan itself reported operational speeds of circa 600rpm when the benchmarking was at its hardest.

Overall, we found that the be quiet! SFX L Power did the job perfectly and with minimal noise or fuss.

Given that this is a gold rated power supply, efficiency has to be at a minimum of 88% and while we could not confirm this with our own testing, the design and performance under our own modest testing here found no reason to question the validity of that.

While we do not endorse these results ourselves, be quiet! has provided a chart to show the anticipated noise levels based on the noise output. This would seem to confirm our ‘real-world’ findings that this power supply is exceptionally quiet.