PSU testing and a visit to Be Quiet! headquarters
Posted on 26th Jun 2009 at 15:35 by Richard Swinburne with 4 comments
In an industrial park about 15km outside Hamburg, I was shuttled via taxi to Listan HQ in Germany. This was right after CeBIT and I was there to test PSUs and meet the people behind Listan. The company oversees several others - including Be Quiet! for PSUs and Revoltek for coolers and chassis.
Many of Listan's employees came from competitors such as Enermax and Maxpoint (Tagan, Seasonic etc) just down the road - by PSU industry standards Listan is relatively new, however it's more recently got its act together and made big strides supplying some great Be Quiet! PSUs for the UK market. (On the other hand, the Revoltek brand is... well, it needs development still, in my opinion. It's certainly not to our UK tastes in terms of aesthetics and ownership desirability.)
Generally at Listan, from three to nine people work in each department. The design room is small and simple, and looks over many white boards. It's focused on developing a few key products rather than spamming the market with clones.
Listan's warehouse is, as you'd expect from the Germans, immaculate. Clean, efficient... and then I turn up and sprawl a dozen PSUs across the desks, floor, and most places where they'd left space. Ha!
Many of Listan's employees came from competitors such as Enermax and Maxpoint (Tagan, Seasonic etc) just down the road - by PSU industry standards Listan is relatively new, however it's more recently got its act together and made big strides supplying some great Be Quiet! PSUs for the UK market. (On the other hand, the Revoltek brand is... well, it needs development still, in my opinion. It's certainly not to our UK tastes in terms of aesthetics and ownership desirability.)
Generally at Listan, from three to nine people work in each department. The design room is small and simple, and looks over many white boards. It's focused on developing a few key products rather than spamming the market with clones.
Listan's warehouse is, as you'd expect from the Germans, immaculate. Clean, efficient... and then I turn up and sprawl a dozen PSUs across the desks, floor, and most places where they'd left space. Ha!
