HuntKey Jumper/R90 300W 80Plus Gold
by Martin Kaffei on March 5, 2011 12:00 AM ESTAppearance and Specifications
Our review sample came without retail packaging, so we'll jump straight to the design and appearance. Above is the R90, with large rectangular cutouts for the rear ventilation. That's a standard HuntKey trait, as opposed to the hexagon/honeycomb ventilation used on many other PSUs. The R90 has a matte black finish, transparent fan blades, and cable sleeving that could easily be mistaken for something from Enermax. It's a decent looking, understated design and the case is only 14cm long.
Given the 80 Plus Gold certification, the use of DC-to-RC VRMs should be too surprising, but it's not something we typically see in the 300W market. Most of the power comes on the two +12V rails and we tested OCP at room temperature. OCP kicked in at 28A, which is definitely more than you'd normally get from a 300W PSU. However, the smaller rails can deliver up to around 100W for peripheral hardware and HDDs/SSDs; that means in typical PCs you'll have less than 28A on the +12V rail to work with (like all DC-to-DC PSUs).
That should still be sufficient for running a moderate midrange or lower GPU. HuntKey informs us that up to a single GeForce GTX 260 or 460 (and maybe even a 560 Ti if your CPU isn't too extreme) should work; on the AMD side, that equates to a single Radeon HD 5850 or 6950 or lower (and you might even manage a 6970 if your CPU isn't too demanding). Then again, erring on the side of caution might not be a bad idea, in which case the HD 6850 and GTS 450 would be a more reasonable limit.
The Jumper 300G has a slightly different appearance. Gone is the matte black exterior, replaced by a shiny silver casing. The cable sleeving is also missing, and the fan grille is different. Internally, the units are the same, but the American market will be getting this rather vanilla looking version.
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Taft12 - Sunday, March 6, 2011 - link
... in other words, it's plenty powerful enough for at least 98% of the world's PCs. Time for certain AT trolls to reconsider their definition of worthless.mindless1 - Saturday, March 12, 2011 - link
but many of us aren't energy tards. I don't care if my PSU gets 75% or 80% efficiency, but I do care that it isn't running near 80% of total capacity. Further, PSU reviewers have it wrong, they test as if a 500W PSU is bad if it only does 400W stable, not recognizing that running a 400W capable PSU at 200W is more desirable to many than running a 300W capable PSU at 200W output.The wattage rating is not like a "match this to your system power usage rating", it's a MAXIMUM you are always better off to stay far far under. It is easy to overlook this in reviews because it is impossible to test for the viable lifetime of a system and by that I don't mean lifetime till the next generation of parts come along, I mean what is the first failure point and so on until repair costs more than the value of the system to its present owner, not to an enthusiast that would spend hundreds on upgrades every year or two regardless of failures.
The average computer owner with a system under 5 years old just wants it to keep working as cheaply as possible. Soon that figure will rise to 10 years, given more than double the memory and # of CPU cores installed in the average new system to mostly do the same old tasks. Plus twitter 400 bytes of text at a time.
JasperJanssen - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
Except it really isn't remotely that simple, and if you have a system that consumes 200W max, then it will probably idle under 50 watts, and the 800 Watt power supply (which is decently efficient at 200 Watts, as that's within the powerband 80Plus optimises for), will be ridiculously inefficient at 50, especially compared to a 300W powersupply where 50W is close to the optimised powerband.And if you're thinking you don't care about efficiency.. let me ask you *why* think running a power supply under the rated wattage is a good thing. The only thing I can think of that leads to your purported better endurance is less heat in the power supply, if you're not running at max.
That, too, is no longer as simple as that. A less efficient power supply (like one running way under its rating) will be less efficient at idle loads and thus generate more heat. Its cooling system is never full-on at these low temperatures. It's entirely possible for an 850 watt power supply to be hotter, and last less long, than a 300 watt power supply, when they are both driving the same 50 to 200 watt system.
MainThink - Saturday, March 5, 2011 - link
What's the deal with all the typos?I'm never overly picky, but after the fifth one in two pages I begin to wonder how difficult really is to find two minutes and read the article again before publishing it.
JarredWalton - Saturday, March 5, 2011 - link
My apologies... Martin isn't a native English speaker, so he writes his review and then I go through and try to correct the grammar and/or spelling errors. Since I did the editing/corrections in our CMS rather than Word, spellcheck isn't readily available. I've made another pass and tried to catch any remaining typos, but if you want to point out other errors I'll be happy to correct them.When you're reading/typing/editing, unless you're being very methodical words like "acheivement" and "achievement" read the same. It's like the email that went around a few years ago:
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Mipellssed Wdors
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?
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XZerg - Saturday, March 5, 2011 - link
The mipellssed WdrosMy take on that is that our brain looks for patterns rather than just reading first and the last word - Mipellssed - the "M", "pe", "ll", "ed", "ss" all sort of trigger our brain to recall words that are similar and replace the misspelled version - it just so happens so fast that we think our brain reads it like so but that's not the case.
bobbozzo - Monday, March 7, 2011 - link
Hi Jarred, even if you're using your CMS, FireFox can do spell checking. Are you using IE instead?I already posted about it, but in Page 1 Paragraph 2, 'Season' should be 'Seasonic'.
Thanks
JarredWalton - Monday, March 7, 2011 - link
The CMS has spell checking, but you have to manually select it and it's sort of half-baked. You don't get underlined words as you type, and Firefox's built-in spell checking doesn't work because it's not just a textbox... some sort of rich text editing box with images and such (not sure if it's Java or what). Anyway, I switched to the source HTML view (which is a regular text box), but Season is spelled correctly so I still missed that one. I'll go edit it again. :-)MainThink - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link
I realize reading my comment again that I must have had a bad day 'cause I sound like an *sshole in it.I'm sorry for that and I appreciate your reply.
English is not my first language either but mistakes like 'acheivement' as you mention or the classic 'recieve' jump at me like mad cats LOL
Anyway, thanks again and please forgive my moment of bad attitude.
dvijaydev46 - Saturday, March 5, 2011 - link
I always look at Huntkey with caution as it once reportedly tried to bribe Hardware Secrets to make a favorable review. I hope huntkey produces good PSUs hereafter rather than trying to fool people.