The Corsair SF450 Platinum SFX PSU Review: Corsair's Best SFF PSU Gets Even Better

Hot Test Results

Earlier SFX PSU designs were notorious for their poor power quality figures. More recent models, like the SilverStone SX700-LPT and the Enermax Revolution SFX 650W, were greatly improved. The Corsair SF450 places the standards even higher, delivering electrical performance that most ATX units would be envious of. The 12V voltage line regulation is at 0.4%, an exceptional figure, which goes up to about 1.3% for the less strictly controlled 3.3V and 5V lines. Line filtering is excellent too, with our instruments recording a maximum of 26 mV, 14 mV and 12 mV on the 12V, 5V and 3.3V lines respectively. These figures hardly change even when the PSU is heavily cross-loaded, which is to be expected from a modern platform.

The Corsair SF450 managed to retain most of its energy conversion efficiency while it was operating inside our hotbox. Despite the adverse operating conditions, the average efficiency drop was less than 1% and evenly distributed across the entire load range, suggesting that the components are handling these adverse conditions very well, with no signs of thermal stress.

The small 92 mm cooling fan handled the cooling needs of the SF450 much better than what we expected it would. Even though the ambient temperature is very high and the fan starts with a load of just forty Watts, the noise output remains at comfortable levels until the load exceeds 250 Watts.

After that point, the speed of the fan will increase at a significantly greater rate and the SF450 does become loud when heavily loaded inside our hotbox. These are not regular operating conditions and yet the Corsair SF450 shows that it can maintain trouble-free operating characteristics, even if at the expense of its acoustics performance.