HuntKey Jumper/R90 300W 80Plus Gold
by Martin Kaffei on March 5, 2011 12:00 AM ESTA Great Product, HuntKey!
While it can be pretty easy to find 80Plus Silver power supplies with output ratings of 700W or more, finding such PSUs in sub-500W offerings is rare. Even if we drop the requirement to 80 Plus Bronze, Newegg as an example lists only 12 PSUs rated at 400W or less. Of those, five come from Seasonic, and the only 80 Plus Gold offering is the $130 X-400FL we've mentioned throughout this review. HuntKey looks to add a second with their R90 / Jumper 300G, and it's the first 300W 80 Plus Gold we've seen. Perhaps more importantly, it's already available in Japan for retail customers, not just OEMs. Unfortunately, those of us in the US and Europe will have to wait a bit longer, as HuntKey is still looking for distributors that are willing to carry this sort of product. Hopefully they can find them soon, as this is a very compelling power supply, particularly if they can match or exceed the current 7980 Yen ($96) price point. Let's recap.
Starting with the cables and connectors, while it might be useful to have a longer ATX12V/EPS12V cable, the number of available connectors is outstanding. The R90 has two PCIe connectors (on one cable), along with two peripheral cables with four SATA and four Molex connectors. It might be nice to have a floppy Molex adapter, but you can buy one separately if you really need it--but shop locally, as shipping will probably be five times as much as the cost of the adapter! All told, there are enough connectors here to match most 500W PSUs, which is one more reason the expected price of ~$90 is acceptable.
Moving to the internals and overall build, the R90 / 300G has a good PCM, high quality capacitors, and a small high frequency transformer to save PCB space. This is one reason why the power of this design should not be underestimated. It's a strong PSU in a 14cm housing. In addition, HuntKey implemented all of the important safety functions on several ICs, and these features worked properly in testing. The high efficiency comes courtesy of the active rectifying, resonant topology, and well chosen MOSFETs with good characteristics. I've had a quick look at a SuperFlower PSU with almost the same quality, but it lacked OCP and used a cheaper material for the PCB. Right now, there really isn't anything comparable to this HuntKey model. Here's a recap of the performance to sum things up.
| HuntKey R90 (Jumper 300G) | |
| Features | Measurements |
| Active PFC | 0.973-0.987 |
| 80 Plus Gold | Up to 90% efficiency |
| High quality capacitors | Less than 0.50% ripple & noise |
| 1200RPM fan | No more than 26 dBA |
Our testing confirms that the R90 achieves the necessary marks for 80 Plus Gold certification, and efficiency is 85% even at a 30W load. The power factor is always above 0.90, though it's a bit lower if used on a 230VAC power grid. Ripple and noise are also well within specification, and the 3.3V rail in particular is virtually flawless; the 5V and both 12V rails are also good, with ripple less than half of the allowed maximum. Overall, we can't find any real points of criticism--even the appearance and cable sleeving are nice (though the 300G skips the sleeving).
We definitely look forward to seeing HuntKey's 90R / 300G in other markets outside of Japan, as this PSU would be perfect for HTPCs. The Seasonic X-400FL is still a viable alternative, though, depending on the pricing of the R90. Besides HTPCs, average PCs looking to "go green" and even gamers with moderate GPUs might be interested in this small, energy-saving PSU. HuntKey informs us that the GTX 460 (about the same as the HD 6950) are the maximum level of GPU they can support on this unit, and that's quite realistic, since +12V OCP is 28A. HuntKey's R90 is the sort of power supply we'd like to see more readily available, especially since the vast majority of PCs rarely need more than 200W (and often less than that). We'd give them an award, but we'll wait for more information on pricing and availability outside of Japan first.
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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.