Nexus RX-6300 630 Watt Power Supply

Installation and Testing

Installation was simple and straightforward, although I did hit on one snag. As you can see, most of the cables had plenty of slack, with the exception of the EPS12V cable, which is used to provide extra power to the CPU. This cable was barely long enough to reach the plug on the motherboard, and certainly not long enough to allow for any kind of out-of-sight routing. If I had any additional expansion cards installed, such as a RAID controller, it would not have reached at all! Given the rise in popularity of ATX cases with bottom-mounted PSUs—especially among the quiet computing crowd—this shortness-of-cable is both puzzling and unfortunate. Since the EPS12V cable is one of three cables hard-wired into the body of the PSU, this may well be a showstopper if you have a larger case or a less-conveniently-located EPS12V plug on your motherboard.

Testing was done in a fairly old-fashioned way: multimeter probes were inserted into the power connectors at motherboard, video card, and one of the hard drives. Then, I watched the multimeter while I powered the system up, booted into Windows and sat idle for a while, then fired up CPUBurn and FurMark and ran them simultaneously for an hour. Power on the 12V, 5V, and 3.3V rails stayed within 0.1v of optimal at all times, and never fluctuated by more than 0.03v. Also, putting my ear directly up to the exhaust grille during stress testing allowed me to hear…absolutely nothing. This PSU was dead silent from startup to shutdown, with no errant clicks, buzzes or hums at any point.

Conclusion

Nexus has a sleek, solid, silent PSU in the RX-6300. While the short EPS12V cable will certainly be a concern to some, every other aspect of performance is stellar. If you’re looking to build a silent PC for a home theater, a file server, or any other situation where noise is a no-no, this power supply will not disappoint.

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