500W to 550W: 12 Power Supplies Compared
by Christoph Katzer on February 20, 2009 5:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
Akasa Green Power AK-PT050FG - Overview
We had quite a few requests from readers in the past asking us to look at some Akasa power supplies. Like Arctic Cooling, Akasa was famous for its coolers at the beginning of this millennium, but they lost business over time to increased competition. Today, the Taiwanese company has a subsidiary in England that's responsible for the European market. We asked Akasa to send us some review samples, and the first model we received is the 500W Green Power. This PSU is manufactured by Enhance, and it's supposed to be a very solid and stable unit. Rest assured, this is not the last Enhance PSU will be looking at today.
Like most power supplies these days, the Green Power has a black exterior. The front of the PSU has some small vertical perforations, which is a little odd as this could cause increased temperatures inside your system. Most of the airflow should still vent through the rear of the PSU, however.
Most of the Enhance units we've seen to date have a large heatsink attached to the rectifier bridge (upper right side of the above image), which sort of resembles an old TV antenna. The rest of the design is pretty basic but contains all of the components we would expect from a higher and power supply. Akasa uses a Nippon Chemi-Con capacitor for the primary, with Su'scon capacitors for the secondary.
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marraco - Friday, February 20, 2009 - link
Any good PSU review need to include reliability test when two PSu are joined by soldiering the green cable (and one black).It allows to use two cheap units as one more powerful one, saving lots of money for value overclockers. But is not ever safe. Not all power supplies are reliable when joined this way.
If the two PSU is bad, there are a risk of getting a burned (and costly) video card, or BSOD by electric instability.
But value overclockers take risks to save money, and spent scarce money in the right components.
That is the reason for which that hard to find and very valuable info is so useful.
Please, consider it next time you do a PSU review.
drank12quartsstrohsbeer - Friday, February 20, 2009 - link
I'd like to see a few tests done that would show the variation between identical units. These powersupply builders rely on other manufacturers for the components, so the chances for a bad component to make it into a unit is a lot higher than for some other computer equipment.7Enigma - Friday, February 20, 2009 - link
That is a very good point. And it wouldn't be too difficult in terms of additional testing since only the major tests (ripple, voltage flux, etc.) would need to be tested.Even an N=2 would be a good quality check.
marc1000 - Friday, February 20, 2009 - link
congrats for including Arctic Cooling and Akasa units. will ready more carefully later. cheers.7Enigma - Friday, February 20, 2009 - link
I'm really upset with the Tuniq's poor showing. I built a system last month using the Tuniq after recommendation by Mr. Katzer in the comments section and had thought it would have performed much better. I ended up only paying $40 (if the $40 rebate actually comes in) which is about as low as you can get for a 550psu, but I would not have chosen it if this review had been available.Really disappointed.
Exar3342 - Friday, February 20, 2009 - link
It seems that PSU reviews dominate the reviews here at AT lately. Where did all the memory and CPU shootouts go? What about comparing panel sizes and reviewing them?I don't want to take anything anything away from this PSU review, it was excellent. Just give us more review variety!
Gary Key - Friday, February 20, 2009 - link
DDR3 Roundup - 3/3 (nine sets, 1066~2000)DDR2 Roundup - 3/10 (eleven sets, 800~1150)
Interspersed each week for the next month will be various motherboards in the under $150 price range, budget CPUs, storage (external, NAS, internal HDD/SSD), and even some GPU action showing what you get for under a $100 compared to integrated graphics. We just went through a major overhaul of our base test suites, start rolling out the new stuff next week.
crimson117 - Friday, February 20, 2009 - link
What are you talking about? There's plenty of that kind of coverage...http://www.anandtech.com/guides/showdoc.aspx?i=347...">Holiday Memory Guide - several choice DDR2 and DDR3 modules are listed with OC results.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...">Phenom review, with lots of benchmarks comparing almost every current AMD and Intel CPU.
http://www.anandtech.com/displays/showdoc.aspx?i=3...">24" LCD Roundup is a little outdated, but monitor models don't change over as often as CPUs do.
Ditiris - Friday, February 20, 2009 - link
Christoph,This is easily the best presentation of material I've ever seen on Anandtech. Furthermore, it's a survey of mainstream components which is probably what 95% of your readership is going to buy. Those two things easily make this the best article I've ever seen on Anandtech.
As someone who does technical presentations all the time, I know how difficult it is to condense large amounts of data into easily understandable formats. You really did a fantastic job. Thank you, and I look forward to more articles.
homerdog - Friday, February 20, 2009 - link
Agreed, excellent article. Now give XClio some love!