If it’s the cream of the power supply crop that you seek, then we just looked at five different models that certainly deserve such a distinction. They all sport very high efficiency, which is what we were expecting from a round-up of Platinum-rated PSUs.

But two of these products stand out from the crowd: Cooler Master's Silent Pro Platinum gives us unprecedented power efficiency, followed by the value-packed Rosewill Fortress 550.
However, the Enermax Platimax 600 W and Kingwin Lazer Titanium 550 W aren't all that far behind. Most of the samples we reviewed exhibited minor flaws. For example, Rosewill's Fortress 550 exceeds the maximum allowable ripple voltage on the 12 V rail, which is an indication of cutting corners in circuit design or component quality. While Enermax's Platimax also exhibits spikes on the DC rails, they're extremely short and can safely be disregarded.
Although the Cooler Master and Kingwin models don't suffer any specific flaws, we still have suggestions for both manufacturers: we’d like to see longer cables on the Silent Pro Platinum, and better soldering on the Lazer Platinum.
At the end of the day, Cooler Master, Enermax, and Kingwin share a first-place finish in today's round-up, and prospective customers should make their decision between those three power supplies based on your own criteria (price, the number of 12 V rails, connector counts, and so on).
The price/performance winner is Antec. No other company offers such high efficiency at an entry-level price. Though the EarthWatts Platinum 550 W misses the stringent 80 PLUS Platinum thresholds by a slim margin, we think the power supply's price point offsets that to a large degree. We also determined that the 80 PLUS organization's test criteria partly differs from ours, primarily with respect to the load placed on each rail. So, we do believe that Antec deserves its Platinum logo, as long as you follow the organization's methodology. If you can live without modular cables, the EarthWatts Platinum is worth looking at, too.
- In The Power Supply World, Gold Paves The Way For Platinum
- Antec EarthWatts Platinum 550 W
- Results: EarthWatts Platinum 550 W
- Enermax Platimax 600 W
- Results: Enermax Platimax 600 W
- Kingwin Lazer Platinum 550 W
- Results: Kingwin Lazer Platinum 550 W
- Cooler Master Silent Pro Platinum 550 W
- Results: Silent Pro Platinum 550 W
- Rosewill Fortress 550
- Results: Rosewill Fortress 550
- Test Setup, Hold-Up Time, And Inrush Current
- Efficiency (According To The 80 PLUS Spec)
- Efficiency (Based On Performance Profiles)
- Which Platinum-Rated Power Supply Should You Buy?
and i was making popcorn.
and i was making popcorn.
Pleasant read, though, I like PSU reviews.
they asked for vendors for the PSUs. Theres the offshoot chance that seasonic declined the offer. On other sites, the 520w fanless seasonic unit was compared to Rosewill's 500w silent night unit. The seasonic unit I believe in that review barely edged out a victory.
I believe this is still applicable to all of the power supply testing our German team does: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/psu-test-equipment,2657.html. I'm waiting for confirmation that I'm right.
Edit: Yup, that's the correct testing equipment/procedure!
Why is the 80 plus spec officially test by having more load on the 3.3v and 5v rails?
Clearly loading the 12v rail would give us a better overall image
Never mind I see the ripple data buried in the individual tests. It would have been better in the summary side-by-side tests.
Nice article.
Sorry!
The page you requested couldn't be found
fix'd that for ya
Sorry, take the period out of the end of the URL.
Your priorities are obviously backwards. Rosewill's entry, by your testing, failed to meet ATX spec by producing an unacceptable amplitude of ripple on the 12V rail. By definition, this is a fail. This isn't a minor flaw, this is violating spec. A failure can not stand out from the crowd (at least in a positive sense). Now, there are other posters here that dispute your results, but you don't have that luxury. Both your results and summary comments indicate that this unit is a failure no matter how good the efficiency, price, or other metrics look.
You can argue the importance of efficiency versus DC output quality all you want when the unit meets spec, but all of the components in your system rely on PSUs to actually meeting spec in order to function properly. Without meeting spec, there is no way to guarantee components will work properly. In fact, failing to meet spec pretty much guarantees that some component somewhere will not work properly. I've seen enough devices (granted poorly designed) fail to work properly with PSUs that had ugly DC quality, but were technically within spec to recommend one that is out of spec.
Also, the difference in cost between the Gold and Platinum rated models seems to negate the power savings one would realize by going with a Platinum model. Since I do run a few of my machines 24/7, I am curious to see where the efficiency lies for low power consumption for a variety of 80+ certified models as this level of power consumption occupies a large majority of the up-time (70+%).