E-Power 600w Power Supply Mini-Review :: E-Power 600W

Computer hardware advancement took off rather quickly in the last 6 months. Although the last breakthrough for processors was the release of AMD's 64-bit CPU, everything else inside a system boomed like no other. Enthusiast desktop memory is getting all the attention over the low latencies and amazingly high overclocking achieved. Another major component, the most crucial piece of hardware in a system, is quietly grabbing attention. That hardware is the power supply and is something many of us take for granted.

The power supply is the single most important piece of hardware in a computer system. Many enthusiasts skimp out on making a quality purchase and just settle for anything that is cheap and provides power. That is entirely wrong. The use of a cheap power supply causes system instability, hardware failure, and worst of all, hardware shortage. The last thing anyone wants to do is to spend money on hardware just to see it fry. One thing that many people fail to realize is that a power supply does not always supply the wattage written on the box. Cheap no name brand power supplies may say it supplies 500W, but in reality, only supplies a low 250W.

It is important to find out the efficiency as well as the rated operating temperature. This means that the example of the cheap 500W power supply may only supply 500W of power in an internal ambient temperature of 20 degree Celsius. This is far from reality, as a typical power supply ambient temperature rises to about 40 degree Celsius under load. Due to the rise in temperature, that cheap 500W power supply will start to degrade and fluctuate in rails, causing low power output. There are currently many well known respectable manufacturers such as OCZ, Enermax, Antec, Raidmax, Zalman, Tagan/E-Power, and of course the holy grail, PC Power and Cooling.

A year ago, a good 400W power supply was more than enough to keep the system running stably, even under overclocked conditions. With the components nowadays, the same 400W of power will start to drop in rails. In addition to that, the release of Nvidia's 6800 Ultra caused the alarm sirens to go off. The power hungry graphic card was recommended to be paired with a high quality 480W power supply. Furthermore, with Nvidia's introduction of SLI in the nForce4 chipset, a high quality 500W+ power supply is needed. This forces consumers to upgrade not only the motherboard, but power supply as well. Fortunately for us, the demands were heard and production has started. The 600W power supply in today is from E-Power, an excellent power supply manufacturer. The power supply comes rated as following:

• +3.3v: 28A
• +5v: 57A
• +12v1: 17A
• +12v2: 18A

The 600W beast comes with the usual 6 4-pin Molex connectors as well as 2 3-pin floppy connectors. The amount of cables does not stop there. Included are two EMI shielded 4pin Molex cables specific for graphic cards and hard drives. The use of these two EMI shielded cables greatly helps maintain stability to these vital components. To continue, 4 SATA power connectors are provided. Motherboards are coming with plenty of SATA ports and having more than the typical 2 SATA power connectors is a great addition. One of the annoyances with current power supplies is that a 24-pin ATX connector is used, and to fit current motherboards, a 24pin-to-20pin adapter is needed. This creates a bulky look and does not help with cable mess.

E-Power provided an excellent solution for this problem. The ATX connector comes as a 20-pin and has a 4-pin that connects to the 20-pin through a sliding-lock mechanism. If your motherboard needs the 24-pin, then slide it on, if not, slide it off and tuck it away. The same is for the 8-pin 12v connector that is commonly used for server motherboards. The 8-pin can slide off and separate into two 4-pin connectors to plug into regular desktop motherboards and feed the power hungry CPUs. Lastly, a single 6-pin power connector is included. This new 6-pin connector is for PCI Express graphic cards. To round things up, a fan RPM cable is included to monitor the power supply fan speed. And on top of that, everything is enclosed in a beautiful mirror metallic black casing.

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