Closer Look and Performance
After opening the Dagger Pro PSU, we can see how tight everything is installed. It may cause higher temperatures than expected, but high-quality components usually run at lower temperatures with higher efficiency.
All the visible capacitors are rated at 100°C or more. Many, if not all capacitors are Japanese, as we can read in the main features. The main capacitor is Nippon Chemi-Con. It’s rated at 450V, 680uF, and 105°C, so exactly as the specs say.
The soldering and overall build quality look pretty good. Glue spots could be smaller in some places but the aesthetics don’t change much and no one is looking at the PSU insides daily. The soldering of installed daughter PCB boards is exceptional as you can see in the photos.
There are not many heatsinks and their surface is enough to keep everything cool and quiet. The fan is keeping the optimal temperature under load, even though it runs in a semi-passive mode.
The Hydro GT Pro 850W uses a double ball-bearing, DC brushless fan. It’s made by Yate Loon and has 120x120x25mm. It is rated by the manufacturer at 2300RPM, 89CFM, and 41dB. This is maximum as we won’t see or hear it running at these values. Looking at the FSP graphs, the fan shouldn’t spin much faster than 50% of its rated speed, so will be at about 1200RPM when the PSU will be under 100% load.
Performance
Tests were performed on the Intel Alder Lake-S platform, which contains the overclocked Core i9 12900K CPU, MSI Z590 Unify-X motherboard, overclocked ASRock RX6800XT Phantom Gaming graphics card, and additional components to bump the wattage some more. The peak wattage is around 750W.
All results were performed in an open Raijintek PC case with good airflow.
There were no stability issues during all tests. The efficiency of the Hydro GT Pro 850W is great. The +12V voltage was nearly perfect most of the time. A bit higher and lower was only during idle or peak load, but it was still close to the reference values. The PSU easily meets the 80 PLUS Gold certification.
In idle and during the mixed load tests, the PSU was silent. Under full load, we could hear the fan but it was still quiet. For sure many competitive PSUs made us a worse impression.
The mixed load test will be the closest to the daily usage, which is about what we can expect during gaming or some more demanding tasks. During this work, the PSU is just perfect. It’s quiet and delivers stable voltages.
As I mentioned earlier, the PSU can handle two or even three graphics cards, but recently it’s not popular unless someone needs it for specific rendering or mining. Even though we tested it with the RX6800XT graphics card, then our model was equipped with 3×8-pin PCIe connectors, so about the same as RX6900XT/RTX3090.
The Hydro GT Pro seems like a perfect PSU for most gamers and other demanding users. It’s hard to find any weak points of its design, so I’m sure that all who decide to purchase it, will be satisfied.
