Super Flower revealed an upcoming line of affordable PSUs. The company behind EVGA's high-end units announced 10 products featuring 80 PLUS Bronze efficiency, three of which have an optional semi-modular cable design, with the rest using native cables to restrict production costs.
The company said the new units are based on a double-forward topology platform, which will use quality components like Fairchild PWM and PFC controllers, Infineon PWM controllers and FETs, Fujitsu relays, Teapo 105℃ caps, and the like.
The first model of this line, the 450W member, will be released in Q1-Q2 2017. SF's new Bronze units will cover the 400W to 850W range, and in the U.S. market, where Super Flower doesn't have a retail presence, we will probably see those PSUs under EVGA's brand. Unfortunately there is no price information.
The platform uses very small heatsinks, and the PCB is underpopulated. We did notice that there are no DC-DC converters for the generation of the minor rails, and we're somewhat worried about there being only two coils on the secondary side, because that is an indication of a group-regulation scheme. In a group-regulated scheme, usually the +12V and 5V rails are regulated together, so in highly unbalanced (among the rails) loads, the voltages of the rails show great deviations.
The bulk capacitor will be provided by Teapo, like all the rest in this platform. (We would prefer a good Japanese cap.) The bulk cap is of high importance because it deals with very high voltage (loosely regulated 380VDC bus voltage), which can easily shorten the lifetime of a low quality cap. Nonetheless, SF looks to be highly confident about the reliability of this platform, and given its tradition of quality so far, we should trust its design choices.
