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Enermax Platimax 850 W |
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Value and Conclusion
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| 8.8 | All manufacturers are currently working on high-end Platinum efficiency PSUs, so we expect the competition to get really hard. This is very good for all users out there, since extreme competition means better products at lower prices. In the case of Platimax 850W, Enermax followed the most convenient solution in order to boost efficiency; they used a slightly modified version of the Modu 87+ platform. Tweaking an existing platform is sure an easy way to get Platinum efficiency at low manufacturing cost, but may result in suboptimal overall performance. In my testing at 20% load, efficiency is way below Platinum limits, at least at the high operating temperature of all my tests. Efficiency at higher loads is very high and certainly worthy of 80 PLUS Platinum, maybe Enermax can do some more tuning for lower loads. Also I would like to see tighter voltage regulation overall and a tad better ripple suppression on all rails. Now for what I really liked on this unit. First of all the external quality is top notch and the finish is excellent. I also liked the unit's cool and at the same time quiet operation. I tried very hard to raise the temperature inside the hotbox leaving the heating element on for quite long and even when ambient reached very high levels the PSU still worked flawlessly. Finally I found more than enough connectors, for its capacity. The free PCIe socket on the modular panel lets you buy an an additional PCIe cable, then you could have eight PCIe connectors along with two EPS ones at the same time! To sum up, if you want to buy an efficient, high quality PSU to power two or three VGAs and you hate noise then the Enermax Platimax 850W is a good candidate, since it offers reliability and good performance overall along with silent operation. If its price follows the usual 1:1 conversion (Euro:Dollar) which almost all companies use in their product pricing, totally ignoring the real Euro/Dollar rate, then you should expect it to reach the U.S. market with a retail price of a little over $200. This is definitely not cheap at all but for a Platinum 850W unit it is reasonable. |
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