High Performance At A Fair Price
Yet again, Rosewill managed to deliver a very good PSU that offers top-notch performance and nice features, such as fully modular cabling and Japanese electrolytic capacitors. Although the company didn't manage to offer a significantly lower price than its competitors, the Quark 1000 is still reasonable, especially considering that the platform has an increased production cost due to its high-quality components. We believe that Rosewill is now well established in the tough PSU market and ready to meet the competition, even in this high-end PSU category, where big companies like Corsair, EVGA and Seasonic dominate the field. It is nice to see new players with fresh designs in this category; it ultimately will benefit consumers as well.
The Quark 1000 comes with a bevy of connectors and, along with its 1kW capacity, will easily support a potent gaming system with multiple, high-end graphics cards installed. Given that an Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 needs around 200W in worst-case scenarios, a 1kW PSU can easily support up to three of them, along with a strong CPU and the remaining system components. If you want to build a four-way SLI system, you should go with the Quark 1200 to be on the safe side. If you prefer AMD's offerings, 1kW keeps you around two Radeon R9 290X GPUs, given that each of them needs around 310W at peak load.
Then again, you'll have to make some compromises with regard to noise. Or you can just crank up the volume of your speakers when you stress the PSU, since its fan is noisy at high loads. If Rosewill had offered a semi-passive mode under light/medium loads, things would have been much better. However, under stressful conditions, the situation wouldn't have changed, given the position of the +12V FETs. In units with 1kW of capacity or more, you simply can't expect silent operation. Even the most efficient products generate a significant amount of heat, so strong airflow is required.
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Aris Mpitziopoulos is a Contributing Editor for Tom's Hardware, covering Power Supplies.
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