650W Platinum and Fanless

PSUs: The source of DC power for all components in the PC & often a big noise source.

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andyb
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650W Platinum and Fanless

Post by andyb » Sun Mar 10, 2013 9:09 am

Sounds impressive, but can Enermax deliver this spectacular sounding product with no coil whine and that doesn't cost as much as a kidney.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/Enermax-S ... 42997.html

The coil whine should not be an issue at all due to Enermax being a quality manufacturer, I believe its usually the high voltage stuff that creates the whine but I am sure that the DC-DC circuitry wont hurt in the regards of coil whine and other nasty high pitched non-coil noises.

As for the Platinum rating, that sounds very impressive indeed but most people here will be as interested in its low wattage efficiency as its maximum efficiency at 400w (or wherever it hits its claimed 94%).

As for silent/quiet gamers, this is probably not quite as interesting a product as non-gamers might assume, if only for one reason, fans..... CPU and GPU fans nearly always ramp up inside gaming machines, and gamers (like me) don't really care as there are speakers or headphones turned on anyway, and if those gamers are as diligent as I am with product selection, the noise increase whilst gaming from CPU and GPU fans is not that much anyway over idle fan noises, so this silent PSU will likely not make any real-world noise difference over a good quality PSU in a good case anyway.

Personally I have not once noticed my PSU fan speed increasing whilst playing games (PC specs below), and due to my case having a seperate enclosure for drives and the PSU with no other fan, I would personally have to add a fan to stop my drives and this PSU from cooking themselves (or each other).

The single best thing I can see about this PSU personally is that it is pushing boundaries of just what is possible with modern PC PSU's, and that is very good news for us consumers.


Andy

edh
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Re: 650W Platinum and Fanless

Post by edh » Sun Mar 10, 2013 11:56 am

Great to see another fanless PSU and the fanless options increase to 600W. 600W is too big for virtually all systems so I hope they also produce some lower power units.
andyb wrote:The coil whine should not be an issue at all due to Enermax being a quality manufacturer,
Enermax no longer makes all of their PSUs, some are contracted out. As for quality of manufacture of their own PSUs, my Modu82+ blew up and I'm not alone in having problems with that series. I wouldn't draw conclusions based just on that but it isn't a good sign.
andyb wrote:I believe its usually the high voltage stuff that creates the whine but I am sure that the DC-DC circuitry wont hurt in the regards of coil whine and other nasty high pitched non-coil noises.
DC-DC circuitry has been around for a few years now and has made a huge improvement for efficiency. It does however make packaging more difficult if you look inside and can therefore mean a bigger PSU.

andyb
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Re: 650W Platinum and Fanless

Post by andyb » Sun Mar 10, 2013 12:42 pm

Great to see another fanless PSU and the fanless options increase to 600W. 600W is too big for virtually all systems so I hope they also produce some lower power units.
650W, and yes, its total overkill for most people, but at least its now possible. Fingers crossed on lower power CHEAPER platinum fan-less PSU's.
As for quality of manufacture of their own PSUs, my Modu82+ blew up and I'm not alone in having problems with that series. I wouldn't draw conclusions based just on that but it isn't a good sign.
mmmm, I have an Enermax in my server, I think its a non-modular 82+
DC-DC circuitry has been around for a few years now and has made a huge improvement for efficiency. It does however make packaging more difficult if you look inside and can therefore mean a bigger PSU.
My knowledge of PSU components is not great so I will take your word for it. That would explain why the (now venerable) Antec 120mm fan blowing straight through PSU's were that size, possibly because of the extra circuit-board space needed for the DC-DC components.


Andy

edh
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Re: 650W Platinum and Fanless

Post by edh » Sun Mar 10, 2013 1:10 pm

andyb wrote:650W, and yes, its total overkill for most people, but at least its now possible. Fingers crossed on lower power CHEAPER platinum fan-less PSU's.
Yes, sorry, meant 650W! Silly typo. Cheaper, smaller PSUs would be nice and fanless ones will be more likely in time.
My knowledge of PSU components is not great so I will take your word for it. That would explain why the (now venerable) Antec 120mm fan blowing straight through PSU's were that size, possibly because of the extra circuit-board space needed for the DC-DC components.
Not sure about the Antex PSUs in particular but with many modern PSUs the DC-DC board is on the inside face where the outputs tend to be. To add this in there, along with the likely modular connectors for a high end PSU adds to the length. Look at high end PSUs and they tend to be 160mm rather than 140mm deep. The really high power ones are 180mm plus.

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Re: 650W Platinum and Fanless

Post by CA_Steve » Sun Mar 10, 2013 1:30 pm

Neat to see. Not sure where this mix of wattage + fanless would be relevant. Any system built that would make use of the power will have other sources of noise (one or more gfx cards) that would be louder than a fanned PSU. Plus, even at 94% efficient, that's a lot of heat to dissipate at higher loads.

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