Enigma 850W Power Supply Review
Riotoro was founded by former Corsair and Nvidia employees, so you know that the people behind this company have lots of experience and know how the market works. So far, Riotoro has introduced a fairly wide array of new products for such a young organization, including cases, PSUs, cooling products, and gaming peripherals. As far as PSUs go, there are two sparsely populated families. The high-end line, Enigma, only hosts one 850W member for the time being. The budget-oriented Onyx line consists of two units.
Today we're looking at the 850W Enigma. It's made by Great Wall and shares a platform with the GW-ATX850BL. Corsair utilizes the same platform for its CS models, and considering that some ex-Corsair employees now work for Riotoro, it's hardly a coincidence that the company used a lesser-known OEM like Great Wall for its first PSUs. GW's designs generally offer satisfactory performance and work well for mid-range PSUs. We've also seen respectable high-end models from the company, such as OCZ's ZX Series 1250W.
The Enigma 850 features a single +12V rail and semi-modular cabling, with only the necessary ATX and EPS cables being fixed in place. Serving up to 850W of power, this PSU easily supports potent gaming PCs, particularly since high-end GPUs are more efficient today than ever before.
According to Riotoro, the Enigma family hits a sweet spot between price and performance, so we expect to see the Enigma 850 achieving a high performance per dollar ratio. This shouldn't be difficult, given an MSRP of $120, since we already know this GW platform offers good performance.
Unfortunately, Riotoro doesn't give us any information about its cooling fan's bearing type or the origin of its filtering capacitors. If there's a high-quality FDB fan in there, along with Japanese caps, we're guessing Riotoro's marketing department would draw our attention to them. Don't worry, though. Our tear-downs reveal all.
Specifications
The PSU is 80 PLUS Gold-certified, and its maximum operating temperature for full power delivery is limited to 40°C, even though the ATX spec recommends 50°C. The suite of protection features looks complete, aside from OCP at +12V (which isn't needed in a high-capacity single-rail design). Compact dimensions and an ample warranty are both great to see.
Power Specifications
| Rail | 3.3V | 5V | 12V | 5VSB | -12V | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Max. Power | Amps | 25 | 25 | 70.8 | 3 | 0.8 |
| Watts | 130 | 849.6 | 15 | 9.6 | ||
| Total Max. Power (W) | 850 |
The Enigma 850's power specifications are identical to Corsair's CS850M. The minor rails offer up to 130W of maximum combined power output, while the +12V rail can deliver up to 71A. It'll easily support a couple of top-end graphics cards. Lastly, the 5VSB rail has 3A max current output, which should suffice in most cases.
Cables And Connectors
| Native Cables | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Description | Cable Count | Connector Count (Total) | Gauge |
| ATX connector 20+4 pin (560mm) | 1 | 1 | 18AWG |
| 4+4 pin EPS12V (600mm) | 1 | 1 | 18AWG |
| Modular Cables | |||
| Description | Cable Count | Connector Count (Total) | Gauge |
| 6+2 pin PCIe (550mm+120mm) | 2 | 4 | 18AWG |
| SATA (440mm+100mm+100mm) | 3 | 9 | 18AWG |
| Four-pin Molex (450mm+120mm+120mm) | 2 | 6 | 18AWG |
| FDD (+100mm) | 1 | 1 | 22AWG |
Only the two most important cables are fixed; the rest are modular.
Our first objection here is the single EPS connector. We think that an 850W PSU should be equipped with a couple of them in order to support high-end motherboards. With this design choice, Riotoro restricts this unit's compatibility to mid-range boards rocking one EPS socket. Since the modular board is fairly small, it definitely could have been made larger to accommodate a second EPS connector.
All of the cables are long enough. However, the distance between SATA and four-pin Molex connectors should be greater.
Power Distribution
Since this PSU features a single +12V rail, we do not have anything to say about its power distribution.
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