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

Mike Sanders / 6 years ago

Final Thoughts

How Much Does it Cost?

The be quiet! SFX L Power retails for around £89.00. For just a 500w power supply that might seem a little high, but there are several factors that should be considered. Firstly, this is specifically designed for compact and mini-ITX systems. It’s generally the rule of thumb that a smaller version of something is harder to make and therefore costs more. In addition, though, this is still a fully-modular gold-rated efficiency power supply. That means a lot in the world of power supplies.

As such, when you take all of these factors into consideration, it does actually represent really good value for money.

Overview

We have rarely been disappointed with a be quiet! product. With the possible exception of the Dark Rock 3 cooler’s hideously complicated mounting system. What we can agree on is that all their products not only look good but perform well. While we were unable to put the latter through the more thorough scrutiny of our standard power supply testing methodology, we can confirm that as far as we can see nothing has changed.

The power supply looks great from the outside, well designed on the inside and in our brief but limited testing seemed to do its job perfectly well. What more could you ask for?

Performance

In terms of performance, we are again limited by this power supplies failure to operate in a manner that suits our testing machine. That being said though, in the basic operational test we did employ, it ran our system perfectly happily and handled benchmark levels of demand without a single hitch for well over an hours worth of testing.

If this power supply was going to have a problem, it would have presented itself fairly quickly. Therefore, while we have no firm testing figures, we had no issue in terms of ‘real-world’ testing on the be quiet! SFX L power supply.

Should I Buy One?

Compact and mini-ITX systems are getting more and more popular. As such, having a strong reliably power supply is definitely going to be a major part of that industry as it continues to grow. In terms of whether you should buy this specific model, we would largely refer to what we said in the pricing analysis. This is ultimately a 500w gold rated efficiency power supply with fully modular cable design. That in itself speaks volumes as to the quality of design. Given that this has been thoroughly tested to German standard, this product also comes with a 3-year warranty. Not as big as some power supply warranties, but its still a decent amount of time.

The mounting bracket is also a major plus if you are considering putting this in your compact system. Such an inclusion opens doors rather than closes them.

While we, unfortunately, do not have more thorough testing to back this up, based on what we have seen, we would thoroughly recommend the be quiet! SFX L Power as a solid, well-made power supply. The only slight caveat to some might be the 500w power output, but even there be quiet! has you covered with a 600w version of the exact same product.

Pros

Excellent design both externally and internally.
Fully modular cables.
Gold rated efficiency.
Ran our system without any notable noise and zero drama.

Cons

None.

Neutral

As above, it’s a little disappointing we couldn’t get this to work on our testing bench as we do prefer to give a detailed set of results. In this case though, it appears that it just simply wasn’t meant to be.