2003 Power Supply Roundup Part II: Better Faster Cheaper
by Kristopher Kubicki on July 31, 2003 1:58 PM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
We received our quad fan Kingwin supply well before the TTGI units had hit American soil. The unit was well received in the lab, but as we noticed when the TTGI units arrived, practically identical in construction. TTGI and Kingwin obtain their components from the same manufacturers in Taiwan.
During the publishing of this article, we stopped at Kingwin to see what new technology they were working on. One of the more exciting products they were working on was a second generation power supply that contains much different electronic components. Unfortunately, production samples are still several weeks or months off, so we will not have a review any time soon.
Features on the Kingwin KWI-450 were identical to the TTGI units. The power supply comes with a sheathed ATX cable, gloss finish, aluminum housing and an LED fan. Using extra fans provides some relief if one fan were to die. The idea of “extra” fans has gone a long way for video card manufacturer Albatron, and it is our guess that it will continue to stick around for a while.
Like the TTGI units, the Kingwin supplies suffered the same unfortunate performance problems with their variable fan controls. We will discuss in detail these problems later on in the article.
Wattages
|
|
3.3V |
5V |
12V |
-12 |
-5 |
+5vsb |
combined theoretical |
actual combined |
advertised total |
|
Kingwin KWI-450WABK |
92.40 |
225.00 |
216.00 |
9.60 |
2.50 |
10.00 |
317.40 |
225.00 |
452.00 |
The Kingwin KWI-450 puts out 225W on its +3.3V and +5.0V combined rail. This is about middle of the pack as far as the other power supplies are concerned. The +5.0V rail still seems unnecessarily high.
At $95, the Kingwin power supply is not the cheapest available, especially compared to the near identical TTGI units. We have seen vendors put the Kingwin power supplies in Kingwin cases (which are very well received), so they are still prevalent in the market. Like the TTGI, we thought the Kingwin KWI-450 was a good balance of features and price, but maybe not performance.
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Anonymous User - Friday, August 1, 2003 - link
1. No amp measurements were listed, a serious deficiency because without them there is no way to know how well each PS met its amp specs, and many brands are known to fall short.2. No overload testing results for shorts, excessive power draw, excessive temperature.
3. Ripple is not just slow voltage variation also short term variation, such as for each AC cycle (60 Hz for the incoming AC, about 60,000 Hz for the output DC). I would have liked to see how the latter correlated with the memory noise test results.
4. I hope you were careful when you tested the PS heatsink temperatures because some heatsinks are live with high voltage.
Anonymous User - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
Well for the observent people who can differentiate between orange and blue, its not an issue. Also waiting a full second before clicking it reveals the location on both the bottom left and the mouse cursor. but i can see how it does get annoying.Anonymous User - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
yeah those in page advertisements are REALLY annoying...those have got to go. i never know when i'm going to link to another anandtech article or to an ad...i guess that's the point but it's still unacceptableAnonymous User - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
I would like to see the review include a Heroichi Electronic power supply, I hear they are very good but I haven't used one.Anonymous User - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
Some of your "In Page Advertising" links seem to be missing closing links tags or something so that it results in having a <link> in the middle or end of a sentence. Ex. "We had a lot of troubles with Vantec’s last power supply, the Stealth. We found an error in the production label<link>, which quickly led to a change in all the labeling on all Stealth power supplies."KristopherKubicki - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
#3 and #4, thank you for spotting these errors. I have updated and fixed them.Cheers,
Kristopher
Anonymous User - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
I hope the ripple for the PC Power & Cooling 3V wasn't 2.295.. Possibly 3.296??? 1 volt drop is unacceptable.Anonymous User - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
The REAL price of the pc power&coolinghttp://www.directron.com/pcpower.htmlAnonymous User - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
a little more content per page in some cases would be nice too......but good to see content on the site at all...and seemingly more regularly too...
Anonymous User - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
woah guys, the tables need some work...