The Rosewill Quark Series Power Supply Review (750W, 850W, 1000W, 1200W)

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• Dug - Friday, January 15, 2016 - link

  I'd still rather own a Porsche

• catzambia - Monday, January 25, 2016 - link

  BUT FORD IS BACK IN 2016 SO STEP OFF CHEVY!

• takeshi7 - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link

  the ZR1 MSRP is $120K

• chlamchowder - Wednesday, January 13, 2016 - link

  A good question though, is whether a non-budget PSU is worth it. It'd probably take a very, very long time for power bill savings to make up for the additional cost of getting a more efficient PSU.
  
  For stability, lots of budget power supplies from reputable manufacturers have no problem at their max rated power outputs. And in most systems (single GPU particularly), actual power draw doesn't come close to what the power supply is rated for.

• wolfemane - Wednesday, January 13, 2016 - link

  In my older gaming rig, I currently have a budget EVGA 1000w PSU. It powers twin 290x's, i7-3770k (OC'ed all the way to 4.8ghz, ran SETI folding with 100% cpu/gpu utalization 10hours, 5 days a week for almost 6 months) 32gig trident ddr3-2400, 256gig solid state and twin 6gig seagate drives. CPU and GPU's are cooled by a custom water cooled system with 55w pump. Taking in all parts and their max power rating my system is rated around 975w. When I first built this, powered it up, and started playing my first games I seriously wondered how much I was actually pulling. I wasn't going to buy anything expensive to see, but at the wall kill-a-watt units can give an idea, so I got one. At idle the system bounced around from 150w to 250w. While playing a variety of games across the system requirements range, kill-a-watt was reporting anywhere from 400w all the way to 670w (stock system no overclocking). I then went through the series of benchmarks most gamers like to go through and the highest wattage I could get was with the HEAVEN benchmark at max settings over 4 hours. I saw outputs range from 650w~715w pretty consistently. Adding a 10% OC on both GPU's, and stabilizing the 3770k @ 4.8ghz I again benched. I remember seeing numbers from 900 - 1100w being reported by the kill-a-watt. Once I found a good stable point for the CPU, the system never failed throughout the month long series of tests and benchmarks.
  
  Now, how accurate is that? I don't know and I don't have any way of finding out.. BUT at $80, peaking at a supposed 1100w, and under constant heavy use over the last three years this budget PSU has handled just fine.
  
  But my wife and I decided to take it a little further and see how much my system was draining us month to month in our power bill. So we shut down and unplugged my rig for a full month. No other routines changed.
  
  I'm a pretty active gamer and I have two kids. My gaming rig is used ALL the time, much more than any other system in the house (including my wife's multipurpose htpc). We didn't change our habits any, and I utilized her power efficient system more than I usually do. But my gaming rig stayed for for 32 days. All in all, it lowered our power by a couple dollars at the most.
  
  So, I can't see the argument in getting a far more expensive PSU in the name of efficiency to save money on power. For normal to heavy day to day us I just don't see it happening. MAYBE if my system was folding/mining 24/7 a more efficient PSU would be in order, but I really don't think I'd save all that much. Certainly not enough to cover the premium price.
  
  Oh, and my apologies for misspelling Porsche in my previous post. No insult intended

• Meaker10 - Wednesday, January 13, 2016 - link

  That's pretty normal, remember you are measuring at the wall which means your PSU at 1100W and assuming 80% efficiency is giving the system 880W and consuming 220W for itself. A platinum PSU at that point would use around 110W saving you 110W in power.

• wolfemane - Wednesday, January 13, 2016 - link

  its 80 Plus Gold, so 87% at load, 90% at 50% load. Platinum isn't that much greater.
  
  But it still stands that these premium platinum drives aren't really worth the $50+ premium (1000w model). The premium PSU will die long before you make up the energy costs. SO why spend the money on such units?
  
  Thanks to corsair:
  
  http://www.corsair.com/en-us/blog/2012/august/80-p...
  
  In the end, you're not going to save yourself a whole lot. Certainly not enough to justify the $50+ premium. There are cheaper better brands out there that will do the same, if not better, than these.
  
  This all leads to the original post that these Platinum PSU's most certainly can, and should, be compared to the budget versions.

• KAlmquist - Thursday, January 14, 2016 - link

  An 80+ Platinum unit will typically draw about 2.5% less power than an 80+ Gold rated unit, so these units would only make sense if they were priced very close to comparable 80+ Gold units. As you say, even the difference between 80+ Bronze and 80+ Platinum is not all that significant.

• DanNeely - Wednesday, January 13, 2016 - link

  From the list on the 80+ test page, it looks like a lot of the reason why the 750 is different from the others isn't that they decided to use a different design just for one model as seems implied in this article; but that Rosewill just didn't submit the 2 smaller members of the series for review. The 2015 quark series also includes 550W and 650W models that are presumably based on the same smaller platform as the 750. The 550's performance in official testing makes it look exceptionally attractive for systems that are rarely under high load since it manages 90% efficiency in the 10% load test.

• Flunk - Wednesday, January 13, 2016 - link

  It's going to be a hard sell trying to move premium power supplies under the Rosewill name. Their initial power supply products were so bad that the really tainted the brand. Power supplies are one thing I don't like to take chances on and it will be a long time before I even consider a Rosewill power supply.