Cooler Master eXtreme Power Plus 550 W Power Supply Review

Power Distribution

In Figure 14, you can see the power supply label containing all the power specs.

Figure 14: Power supply label.

As you can see, according to the label this unit has two +12 V rails. Inside the unit the +12 V wires are separated into two different groups, connected to individual filtering stages. Although this is a terrific configuration, there is no over current protection monitoring each rail. The two groups are divided like this:

• +12V1 (solid yellow wire): Main motherboard cable, SATA power cables, peripheral power cable and one of the video card power cables.
• +12V2 (yellow with black stripe wire): ATX12V/EPS12V cable and one of the video card power cables.

If you are going to install a video card with just one auxiliary power connector, install it to the connector using solid yellow wires. This way you are going to keep the video card separated from the CPU.

Now let’s see if this power supply can really deliver 550 W.