ASUS Atlas A-45GA 450 W Power Supply Review

Power Distribution

In Figure 16, you can see the power supply label containing all the power specs.

Figure 16: Power supply label

As you can see, according to the label this unit has two +12 V rails. The +12 V wires are really divided in two groups and we could clearly see a “shunt” (current sensor) connected to each one of them (see Figure 17), but since we couldn’t get the datasheet of the monitoring integrated circuit, we can’t say with 100% confidence if this power supply really has over current protection (OCP) monitoring each rail.

Figure 17: Current sensors

The two groups are divided like this:

• +12V1 (solid yellow wire): Main motherboard cable, SATA power cables, and peripheral power cable
• +12V2 (yellow with black stripe wire): ATX12V connector and video card power connector

This distribution is awful, because it puts the two components that pull most of the computer current/power (the CPU and the video card) on the same rail. This is another evidence that this power supply uses an obsolete design.

Now let’s see if this power supply can really deliver 450 W.