German power and cooling specialist be quiet! has taken the opportunity of exhibiting at its home show, CeBIT, to unveil updates to its Pure Power L8 PSUs, fans, and heatsinks.
We reviewed the Pure Power L8 CM (Cable Management) power supply last year and found it to be a good deal, offering sensible wattage at keen prices. Reducing the price further, be quiet is bringing a wider range of non-modular L8s, starting at 300W and rising to 700W. be quiet! appears to understand that most users don't need 500W-plus supplies for today's powerful base units, and the 80 PLUS Bronze L8, which features a solid design and cable sleeving all the way into the unit, seems like a decent bet.
Here's be quiet! Aaron running through some of the features of the new supply and, in keeping with the budget theme, introducing the sub-£10 Pure Wings 2 fans.
A 135mm Pure Wings 2 fan is found on the company's latest enthusiast heatsink. The Dark Rock 2 fits in below the top-of-the-range Pro variant. Due to be priced at £35, this hefty cooler uses four 8mm heatpipes that run through a well-finished array of aluminium fins and out to the top, where they're capped off by an also-aluminium cover.
be quiet! reckons the cooler is capable of handling 160W TDPs. This means that it shouldn't have much problem in keeping a mid-overclock Core i7 chip relatively cool under load. As usual, there are mounting brackets for all of Intel and AMD's latest chipsets.
The Pure Wings 2 fan can be mounted on any of the four sides, designed this way to ensure that the fan doesn't obstruct any motherboard heatsinks that tend to be in abundance on enthusiast boards.
We prefer the nickel-plated, anodised Dark Rock 2 on aesthetic grounds, but if be quiet! can hit an all-in price of around £30 on this model, which is due out soon, it could be on to a winner.
