Introduction

We would like to thank Rosewill for supplying the review sample.

Rosewill continues to impress us with their top-quality, high-performance products, and we now have the honor of being the first to test their top-of-the-line Hercules-1600. Its name, Hercules, references the ancient Greek hero, which definitely makes sense because it is one of the strongest PSUs on the market today. This beast can deliver 1600 W at even 50°C! 130 amperes of power, a crazily high current output, allows it to simultaneously feed multiple high-end VGAs, highly overclocked CPUs, and the rest of the bundle (pumps, fans, HDDs, lights, etc.) with ease. Surely only very few of you can push the Hercules close to its limits, which is similar to incredibly powerful cars: You know you won't need as much horsepower, but it is nice to know it there.

The Hercules-1600 is not only one of the strongest PSUs on the market, but its length of 243 mm also makes it one of the largest! Only a few cases can accommodate it, which isn't much of a problem since the system it powers will require a large case as well. The Hercules has two +12V rails with unequal power distribution. The first can deliver up to 110 A while the second feeds two EPS connectors and can deliver up to 50 A of power, a sufficient amount for every CPU(s) regardless of its overclock and power consumption. You also have at your disposal sixteen PCIe connectors for your VGAs. However, a problem arises if you have enough money to buy four VGAs as you will still need a special motherboard to install all of them, and even installing four high-end VGAs will leave you with spare PCIe connectors for future upgrades. As you will have noticed by now, everything about this unit is over the top, including its price of $400! But such a price will not intimidate you if you have the right system for such a PSU.

Specifications

The unit is 80 Plus Silver certified, and Ecova, the organization behind the 80 Plus program, must have had a really hard time certifying this unit with 115 VAC input since it takes a lot of voltage to achieve over 2 kWA AC. Also, the Hercules thankfully has modular cables, and its DC-DC converters make it Haswell ready.

All popular protection features have been included, but I didn't expect anything else of such a high-end product. A fan with ball bearing, which increases its lifespan, equips this unit and there is no semi-passive operation—the fan is operating constantly. However, there is a turbo switch at the front of the PSU. Activating it will force the fan to rotate at full speed, which can be useful in critical situations. The unit is very large, like its warranty and price tag.

There are two +12V rails. The first can deliver up to 110 A while the second feeding the EPS connectors can provide up to 50 A. Crazily high, these combine to deliver 1.56 kW, or 130 A, on +12V alone! No system out there should be capable of pushing this unit to its limits but our Chroma loads will definitely do so since they can apply up to 175 A at +12V.

The minor rails are too strong for a modern system, and we expected more current output on the 5VSB, although 3.5 A will suffice most of the time.

Cables & Connectors, Power Distribution

This beast has 16 PCIe and 16 SATA connectors! The last unit with as many PCIe connectors was the EVGA SuperNOVA NEX1500. You are not going to run out of connectors with this unit, that's for sure. As for the number of 4-pin Molex connectors, we would like it to have a couple more, just in case. All connectors are on pretty long cables, so you won't have any problems during installation. The native cables use thick AWG16 wires for lower voltage drops while all modular cables utilize AWG18 gauges, which is the standard size.

The first and stronger rail feeds every connector but the EPS ones. The latter are fed by 12V2 whose 50 A current output will easily cover their needs. The power distribution of both +12V rails is also good since EPS and PCIe connectors are kept separate.