Packaging
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Package was nice and neat. White package that looks modern is quite appealing. The box contained regular things for power supply which were all the appropriate wires including PSI-e connectors, couple of screws, and power cord. A very nice addition was a separate pack for the connectors. For someone like me, who’s terrible at organizing, a simple pack to keep all the wires together goes a long way. It’s been too many times where I’ve found PSU connectors in the weirdest places around my room not to mention looking for them a month ago.
Closer look
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The power supply is actually the same size as most lesser wattage PSU’s. It will fit perfectly well in any chassis that you might have.
The fans is huge, its 140mm wide. A big fan has it’s pluses and has become a trend that PSU manufacturers tend to follow. The reason for big fans is simple, it moves a lot of air but it moves it slowly while the small fans move smaller amount of air faster. Two different ways to cool the PSU but the big fan advantage is in the fact that it is much more quiet. Something that you won’t see is a small fan PSU that is silent.
The fan is receded under a grill. I know few people at TechwareLabs who have a preference for that, including myself. Such design allows for better protection for PSU. We’ve had experience where a PSU that did not have a receded fan and the spinning center of it was exposed. This allowed for certain cases to actually make contact with the fan itself, which is clearly an issue. Now, that is of course an unlucky and unlikely combination but it could happen. One time is one too many in this case.
A very interesting new design is a gold ball textured fan. What this accomplishes, in theory, is it creates much less drag which in turn requires less energy to move around and creates less noise. In theory it’s a good idea, in fact it’s been tested and shown that even creating a car with golf-ball-like texture(proportionate of course) will create much less drag and actually save you a lot of gas. To test something like this would require another exact same power supply with a fan with flat wings and quite sensitive and expensive equipment to test the wattage. Unfortunately, such equipment is simply unavailable at this point.
One thing I have never seen in any computer component review is how much RF interference it produces.
I just installed a coolmax 1000b Power Supply and it creates so much RF interference that you can’t listen to a FM radio, I had a video card that would do the same thing a few years back, I have noticed that different brands of power supplies generate different amounts of RF interference, aluminum PS tend to generate more than those with steel bodies.