Corsair Reveals Its First SFX PSU, The SF600

News
By Aris Mpitziopoulos
published

During Computex 2015, Corsair invited us to its private suite at the Hyatt hotel where we discovered the company's first SFX PSU offering. During the first day of the show, Corsair's SFX PSU passed almost unnoticed. This PSU powers the company's Bulldog HTPC and can provide enough juice to handle even an Nvidia GeForce Titan X GPU along with a powerful processor.

The max power output of the SF600 is 600 W, as its model number implies, and its efficiency is 80 PLUS Gold certified. Although we usually find 80 mm fans inside such small PSUs, which in most cases are noisy, Corsair managed to squeeze a 92 mm fan into the SF600. The larger fan will be able to rotate at lower speeds, while providing enough airflow to keep the PSU at normal temperatures. The original manufacturer (OEM) of the SF600 is High Power, which lately has made a strong entry into the SFX PSU market where up until now, Enhance Electronics dominated the field.

Corsair also made a number of other product announcements at the show, which you can read about here.

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Aris Mpitziopoulos
Contributing Editor

Aris Mpitziopoulos is a Contributing Editor at Tom's Hardware US, covering PSUs.

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10 Comments Comment from the forums
  • David Dewis
    Interesting to see that the modular connections are the same as the full-sized power supplies. It should make getting extra/custom cables cheaper and easier.
    Reply
  • warmon6
    nice to see the SFX psu's are starting to gain some traction.
    Reply
  • nukemaster
    They should release one without modular cables. Those plugs are just too much in some of the smaller cases.

    Other than that, getting a 92mm fan seems like a great idea.
    Reply
  • MU_Engineer
    SFX power supplies are used in mini-ITX systems. Anything drawing 600 watts in such a tiny case would be fearsome to try to keep from melting. That's about the power draw and size as an average two-slice toaster...
    Reply
  • iam2thecrowe
    its good to see these psu's, lack of power is the only thing that has stopped me from going to the small form factor.
    Reply
  • David Dewis
    15999423 said:
    SFX power supplies are used in mini-ITX systems. Anything drawing 600 watts in such a tiny case would be fearsome to try to keep from melting. That's about the power draw and size as an average two-slice toaster...

    Not true at all. The reviews to the RVZ01 have been amazing beating out even the CoolerMaster Elite 130 in GPU temps.I for one am really excited for the release of the Silverstone RVZ02. Silverstone are confident enough to remove all the case fans. Good quality airflow design is important at any size. Also worth noting the recent LinusTechTips video where he built inside a silverstone SG-13 ITX case with an 18 Core xeon and TitanX and benchmarks showed great temps and performance.
    Linus's Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjDJNwAANwA
    Reply
  • warmon6
    15999423 said:
    SFX power supplies are used in mini-ITX systems. Anything drawing 600 watts in such a tiny case would be fearsome to try to keep from melting. That's about the power draw and size as an average two-slice toaster...

    Well.... Have you met the RVZ01 case yet? I hear temps are always cool. :)

    https://pcpartpicker.com/b/PPd6Mp

    Although Im not using near the 600w limit of my psu for now, i am still planning to add more hardware to this system when the funds are available and as of right now, everything is staying nice an cool. :)
    Reply
  • Onus
    Who is the OEM, and what is the MSRP?
    Reply
  • MU_Engineer
    16002456 said:

    Not true at all. The reviews to the RVZ01 have been amazing beating out even the CoolerMaster Elite 130 in GPU temps.I for one am really excited for the release of the Silverstone RVZ02. Silverstone are confident enough to remove all the case fans. Good quality airflow design is important at any size. Also worth noting the recent LinusTechTips video where he built inside a silverstone SG-13 ITX case with an 18 Core xeon and TitanX and benchmarks showed great temps and performance.
    Linus's Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjDJNwAANwA

    I saw their review and first of all, that's neat! There were a few reasons they were able to do this though:

    1. Their power consumption at the wall was 383 watts. An 80 Plus Gold PSU like the SF600 has a midrange power efficiency of 50%. The components themselves would only be consuming 345 watts. That's still a lot of power to dissipate but only a little over half of 600 watts. You would expect the at the wall power draw to be 690 watts if an 80 Plus Gold unit were supplying a full 600 watts to the parts, as the spec mandates 87% efficiency at full load.

    2. They noted that the CPU and GPU were not both being hit very hard at the same time during their testing. They mentioned that the graphics tests didn't stress the CPU much and the GPU idles while running a CPU-intensive application like Cinebench.

    3. They also used very specific parts that made it easier to dissipate heat. The CPU used a Corsair self-contained liquid cooler which dissipates its heat right at the case's exhaust rather than dissipating it inside the case. The Titan X is also an external blower card.

    So, that was a very neat (and very expensive!) little build but it's nowhere near 600 watts.

    Silverstone does make very nice mini-ITX cases though. I have one of the Sugo SG-05s and it's extremely well cooled. I have one of the little AMD Athlon AM1 SoCs, a dual-port GbE NIC, a WLAN NIC, and an SSD in mine to make a homebrew router and it's great. However, mine draws maybe 40 watts at absolute full load and only a few watts at idle so it's a long ways from an E5 Xeon and a Titan X.
    Reply
  • damric
    Who is the OEM, and what is the MSRP?

    I'm guessing Channel Well with a mediocre MSRP and suspiciously large rebate.

    J/K I don't know but I hope it's a solid platform that can handle low airflow conditions found in many SFF rigs.
    Reply