Xigmatek NRP-HC1001 and NRP-HC1201 Power Supplies

Conclusion

Xigmatek is a rather new company on the market, and they have gained fame through their good CPU coolers. The prices have always been fair and people get one of the best price-performance ratios possible. With power supplies, the company has tried to venture into new territories. Like many others, they chose CWT as the manufacturer for their power supplies - given the design has found so many buyers, it's reasonable to assume CWT is doing their job well. Maybe it’s simply a low buying price or generally good performance. Other companies have made claims that the basic CWT design is practically unusable as there are too many flaws inherent in the design. However, there are more and more companies using CWT-based designs, and we have not encountered any difficulties with the latest releases. If there were any flaws previously, they have apparently been corrected.

Xigmatek delivered good performance today with their CWT-manufactured unit, so Xigmatek is already making a good standard in the market place. The build quality is, as usual, very good - what we would expect from such a unit in this higher end field. They also provide a very innovative package design which will definitely prove to be an eye-catcher once these units are on display in a shop. Most importantly, the unit build quality is very good and it withstood our tests without sweating.

There are enough cable harnesses and connectors on this unit to power up massive disk arrays and triple-SLI systems. We think it's strange that companies always seem to provide the same number of SATA and Molex connectors, but the demand for Molex connectors is still high, so we won’t see a drop in the number of Molex connectors in the near future. For modular power supplies, we think it's a good idea to include a few extra harnesses so that end users can choose to have either more SATA connectors or more Molex connectors.

With six PEG connectors, these two power supplies can power up every triple-SLI system available. 1000W is actually the lowest power supplies that NVIDIA will officially certify for triple-SLI, even though it isn't always necessary particularly on high-end models. We personally are running a triple-SLI system with three 8800 Ultra graphics cards, a quad-core Core 2 Extreme, and eight hard drives; this is all running with our special edition PC Power & Cooling Turbo Cool 860.

At the end of the day, performance is what counts, and both of the units were really good. The voltage didn’t drop too much on any rail, regardless of what load we applied. Ripple does seem to be a problem, since there were slightly higher results on both units (similar to other CWT manufactured PSUs), but that’s nothing to worry about since everything is still within specification.

From the efficiency graphs you will see that it really doesn’t make sense to run these power supplies with a wannabe system. You need a serious load applied to the power supply in order to reach a good efficiency rating. We said earlier that a good start would be 500W as a normal load, and that is surely not possible with single or dual graphics cards. These power supplies are made for the most hardcore PC enthusiasts who know how to overclock a quad-core triple-SLI system; otherwise, these units will fall asleep delivering only a few hundred watts of power. At 500W, we measured 87% efficiency with an AC input of 230 volts. US citizens with 120VAC will have the need to be happy with 84%, which is still a very good result. These units have a very long period of good efficiency that starts at 500W and ends at a massive 1000W power consumption, and that's the power delivered to the PC. The wall outlet will have to deliver around 1200W of power draw! For reference, that's similar to the amount of power used by many larger household vacuums!

Turning to the price tables, we mentioned in the beginning that Xigmatek offers its coolers at very attractive prices. Can they do the same for their power supplies? We took the liberty to compare the prices to their direct competitor, Thermaltake’s quite similar Toughpower series. On the graphs we see prices in Europe and the U.S and we also see two different price strategies. While Xigmatek has better prices than Thermaltake in the US, they fall behind in Europe where the prices are always at least 10 EUR higher than their competitor. We don’t want to be too melodramatic about 10 EUR, but a higher price is a higher price. It might also be that Xigmatek is just in its early years and doesn’t have equal sales channels compared to a company like Thermaltake. In the US, Newegg has competitive pricing on the Xigmatek units; if you're searching for a high-end power supply, they are certainly worth a look. Besides their performance, users also get an attractive box and a nice looking PSU.