Be Quiet! Straight Power 10 700 W CM (E10-CM-700W) review

Conclusion and evaluation

The Be Quiet! Straight Power 10 700W CM (E10-CM-700W) passed the combined and crossload testing in accordance with the ATX specification, so according to my evaluation methodology, it is deserving of its evaluation. This platform really is more advanced than the standard FSP Aurum. The voltage regulation is much better, the ripple suppression is also nice. In addition, the hold-up time is quite long, and the unit is covered by a 5 year warranty and it’s also semi-modular. One advantage of this unit over some of the competitors’ products is that it has quite long cabling. It even has several thicker wires within the loom, but on the other hand, there’s really no gold-plating. The SATA connectors might only have the thinnest gold-plating layer ever on them.

Unfortunately at the moment, the competition’s products seem much more attractive. Corsair offers the RM750x (which is rated at 50W more) for an even lower price, and all that while competing in Be Quiet’s own domestic, German market! And with Corsair offering 10 years warranty (double that of Be Quiet) it’s not just a marketing slogan anymore. Any after-market service will not cut it when you you can obtain an original, full warranty of 10 years for less. Not to mention that I hardly believe that this E10 CM series could even ever beat the RMx series in terms of noise performance. True, Be Quiet! did focus on noise reduction through certain enhancements as well as adding a silent fan, but which also no doubt most likely also took a large chunk out of the unit’s manufacturing cost. Yet the fan inside the RM750x spins up to 300 RPM slower which no such improvement on Be Quiet’s part can match. A 135mm fan at 1500+ RPM will be always noisy no matter what you do with it.

In my opinion Be Quiet! is focusing their enhancements in the wrong place. Instead they should use better cooling (bigger heatsinks, coupling the heat to the casing) which would result in a decrease of the fan speed. This is a more simple but in the end an overall much more effective approach. And while it’s nice that the fan inside the E10-CM-700W is almost inaudible at even at 700 RPM, we must consider that when it spins at over 1500 RPM under full load, it is just as loud as any other fan. And when it spinning fast and loud the unit’s still not that cool anyway. Another huge blow to this unit in my eyes is the use of garbage capacitors, which is especially bad when combined with the higher internal temperatures. I feel like I’m beating a dead horse here, but I still feel as though I must say it.

It seems like a faux-pas to me when a unit from Be Quiet!, a company which claims to focus on silence, has a product which is not silent, doesn’t run cool either, has poor capacitor quality, and sells all that for such a high price. On top of that, and as usual from FSP, the OPP and for that matter the UVP do not seem functional to me. So essentially we have a high-end unit with two non-functioning crucial protections. So what’s this unit about than? At this moment even Zalman is capable of competing with the E10 700 W CM with their own ZM750-EBT. Yes, it did not pass on hold-up time tests, and the voltage regulation on it is somewhat worse and not to mention the overload tests on it were disastrous, but all things considered, in other areas it performs equally and it also has a 5 year warranty. And most likely as a result of my review, at least in Czech Republic, the price has significantly descreased. It is now roughly 30 % cheaper than the Be Quiet! which means it now easily falls into the mainstream category when you take my criteria into account. For that price one could say that we should look at it in an entirely new light, right?

And if you would like to invest that kind of money which is equivalent to the price of the E10-CM-700W, then get the 750W Corsair RMx or EVGA G2 any day of the week over the Be Quiet!. The way the current market scenario plays out is that these two first compete with each other, then there’s nothing released for a long time, and then there are all the other, subsequent competing units from the other brands. This unit is not really bad per se, but those two are better in almost every respect starting with the price, warranty, build/component quality and even the noise output. Maybe back then in 2014 when things were not that bad, it could have been a contender (but the E10 CM was even more expensive then than it is now). My own general experience is that Be Quiet!’s higher-end units are overpriced for their performance and quality, and this unit doesn’t make me think otherwise. If it was 20% cheaper, it could still be positioned between cheaper and lower-quality segment units like the Zalman EBT. But being that it is even more expensive than the Corsair RMx and EVGA G2 with worse overall performance and only half the warranty, who would buy it other than perhaps brand fans?

The value of the be Quiet! Straight Power 10 700 W CM (E10-CM-700W) as a high-end unit is as follows:

• component/technology quality: −18 p. (− for OPP, − for UVP, − for capacitors, − for thinner wires and lack of gold-plating, + for working OTP, + for extra saver technology, + for secondary side overdesigning)
• built quality: 8 p. (− for solder balls and mess)
• voltage regulation: 11 p. (+ for combined loading, − for crossloading)
• ripple: 11 p. (+ for combined loading, – for crossloading)
• efficiency: 9 p. (− for lower efficiency)
• hold-up time: 13 p. (+ for longer hold-up time)
• others: 7 p. (+ for modular cabling, + for longer warranty, + for extra equipment)

So as a high-end product, the unit gets a value of 41. Assuming the cost is 3500 CZK, then the price per value ratio would be 100×41/3500 = 1.17. We can see that it falls within the middle of our table, though the price per value ratio is much worse. As I stated above, the unit is not necessarily bad, but for its value it costs way too much.

Pros	+ silent at low to medium load + semi-modular cabling + working OTP and OCP + nice voltage regulation + good ripple suppression + long hold-up time + OK efficiency + OK build quality + long and sleeved cables
Cons	− OPP not working − UVP not working − noisy at full power output − runs warm − poor capacitor quality − expensive − no connector gold-plated
Be aware of…	/?\

Thanks

I thank the Be Quiet! company for providing the Be Quiet! Straight Power 10 CM 700 W (E10-CM-700W) unit.

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