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. All main capacitors are Japanese, as we can read in the main features. Most of them are Nippon Chemi-Con, but we can find Rubycon too. The main capacitors are rated at 420V, 150uF, and 105°C.
The soldering and overall build quality look pretty good. It’s hard to see the soldering in the photos of the center, and installed daughter PCB boards with DC to DC converters are also covering a lot. It’s better visible on the back of the board with modular cable connectors.
The Dagger Pro 850W uses a double ball-bearing, DC brushless fan. It’s made by Power Logic and has 92mm. At lower speed, it’s quiet, but the high PSU load makes it run at high RPM. I can’t see that in the specifications, but the graphs suggest it can go up to 2700RPM or higher. The same fans are used for graphics cards of brands like EVGA.
Performance
Tests were performed on the AMD Ryzen platform, which contains the overclocked Ryzen 9 5900X CPU, ASUS Strix B550-XE Gaming motherboard, overclocked ASRock RX6800XT Phantom Gaming graphics card, and additional components to bump the wattage some more. The peak wattage is around 720W.
All results were performed on the open space rig.
There were no stability issues during all tests. The efficiency of the Dagger Pro 850W is great and easily meets 80 PLUS Gold certification. The PSU could handle our test rig without issues. The highest value at +12V is also pretty respectable as most PSUs under high load are passing the 12.20V mark. We can’t compare it to the top 80+ Platinum or Titanium, but it’s still excellent.
In idle and during the mixed load tests, the PSU was quiet and wasn’t significantly audible, or it was hard to separate its noise from the test rig. We could clearly hear it during high load tests what is a bit disappointing considering how well it performs in all tests. It’s still not very loud but stays behind some competitive SFX PSU, which could be loaded to ~700W.
In the mixed load tests, which are close to regular gaming, the PSU acted almost as in the idle state. It was quiet, and voltages were stable. I’m sure anyone who wants a small PSU with headroom of power in case of unexpected tasks will be satisfied.
If we go farther and think about BTC mining, then the Dagger Pro 850W can handle four graphics cards, up to 150W each, so anything close to RTX3060Ti, RTX3070, or RX6700XT.
