Conclusions
Contents
To be completely honest we were somewhat disappointed with Enermax Liberty DXX 500 W, as we expected more from it. Even though it has a 120 mm fan, a modular cabling system supporting two auxiliary power cables for video cards – one of them with a 6/8-pin connector –, more power connectors than the majority of mainstream power supplies, a very low noise and ripple levels and could really deliver 500 W at 48.5° C, its efficiency was somewhat low, being below 80% if you pull more than 300 W from it.
This power supply uses a different design on its secondary, which showed to be not so good. Together with the decision of using a single-transistor forward design on the primary instead of the traditional two-transistor forward, the design used by this power supply proved not to be the best for efficiency.
Also almost all protections failed during our tests, showing that they are either disabled or configured with a value that is too high: this power supply didn’t survive our overload tests.
We know that average users won’t probably overload their units, but it is always nice to know that the power supply will turn off if an overloading situation occurs, instead of just burning.
Users building a mainstream PC won’t probably pull more than 300 W from their PCs, so if you are such user you probably won’t face the efficiency or overloading issues we are commenting. However, when you think that both Corsair VX450W and Antec EarthWatts 500 W are cheaper and better products – both are internally the same power supply and can provide a far higher efficiency and have their protections working just fine – it makes no sense buying Enermax Liberty DXX 500 W today.
Keep in mind that this power supply is already on the market for quite a while and this doesn’t mean that all Enermax products have the same issues. Don’t worry: we will review their latest power supplies very soon.
