X-bit labs

ATX Power Supply Units Roundup: 9 Powerful Models Tested (page 3)

Category: Other

by Oleg Artamonov

[ 02/28/2006 | 10:46 PM ]

Enermax Liberty ELT620AWT (620W)

The second power supply from Enermax in this review belongs to the Liberty series which features detachable power cables. The steel case of the PSU is painted black with tiny spangles, just like the Noisetaker’s. Besides that, Enermax installs 12cm fans in PSUs of this series and the speed of the fans is controlled automatically – the manual adjustment knob is missing on the case.

The mainboard and CPU power cables are quite reasonably soldered into the power supply because they are used in any system and are also expected to drive high currents and each extra connector would worsen the stability of the voltages (the resistance of a connector pins is counted among the biggest hindrances that may occur on the path of electric current).

The rest of the cables are attached to the PSU via 6-pin color-coded connectors: the brown ones are for graphics cards (there are two such connectors here, so you can easily power up your SLI or CrossFire configuration without any adapters or splitters and the black ones for your peripherals (the connectors are universal and each has all the necessary voltages; that’s why you can attach both PATA and SATA devices to any of them).

There’s not much of a protection against wrong connection of the cables: you cannot plug a HDD cable into a graphics card connector, but you can do the opposite. The comprehensible color coding should help you, so you can only do it wrongly if you are attaching the cables blindly in the assembled computer. But even in this case there can be no harm – your trying to turn the PSU on will just trigger off the short-circuit protection.

This model is internally alike to the EG495AX-VE (see above), except that the components ratings and the size of the heatsinks are increased in proportion to the wattage. The PSU is assembled neatly. The output connectors are soldered on a single card fastened to a side panel. There are three non-detachable cables in this PSU:

• Mainboard cable with a 24-pin connector (with a detachable 4-pin part), 60cm long
• EPS12V CPU cable with an 8-pin connector that splits into two 4-pin ones (one part only is used in ATX systems with a 4-pin ATX12V connector; both parts are used in EPS12V and some new ATX systems with a 8-pin EPS12V connector on the mainboard), 58cm long
• Fan’s tachometer cable, 70cm

The PSU comes with a few detachable cables neatly placed in this cute purse:

• Two cables for PCI Express graphics cards with 6-pin connectors, 45cm each
• Two cables with two Molex, two SATA plugs and one floppy mini-plug on each (53cm from the PSU to a SATA plug, then 5.5cm more to a Molex plug, then 10cm to the next SATA plug, then 5cm to another Molex plug, and finally 10cm more to the floppy drive connector)
• Three cables like the above-described ones, except that they don’t have a floppy power connector

All in all, you will get a power supply with an amazing twenty (!) of connectors for your drives if you attach all the cables: 10 plugs for PATA and 10 plugs for SATA devices. And one socket will also be left unoccupied on the PSU.