MSI Turbostream 600 W Power Supply Review

Conclusions

We were surprised with this power supply. With so many people saying bad things about the many previous incarnations of Solytech we were expecting a power supply with low efficiency and that couldn’t deliver its labeled power.

This unit could deliver its labeled 600 W at 52° C, which is wonderful, plus we could pull up to 746 W from it, and it survived!

But this isn’t a “perfect” power supply. Its main problem is the presence of only two SATA power plugs. If you have more than one hard disk drive you will need to use an adapter to convert a standard peripheral power plug into a SATA power plug. If this bothers you, then you need to choose a different product.

The real problem with this unit is warranty. MSI offers a ridiculous 16-month warranty from the manufacturing date (and not from the date you purchase the product). Yes, you read it right. If you buy a power supply that was manufactured six months ago you get only a 10-month warranty. This is probably the stupidest warranty term available in the US right now and we really wonder why a company with the size of MSI would do such a nasty thing. Even Rosewill gives a 3-year warranty for their customers.

On the good side, we didn’t face the same problem we had with Rosewill RD600N-2SB-SL-BK where the power supply wouldn’t turn on with we set our load tester to pull 600 W with the unit hot. This probably indicates that the cooling solution used by this unit (two 80 mm fans) is more efficient than the one used by Rosewill RD600N-2SB-SL-BK (one 120 mm fan). Also over current protection (OCP) proved to be active and working, while on Rosewill RD600N-2SB-SL-BK this circuit was either disabled or set at a value that was too high.

MSI Turbostream 600 W is certainly a good product for the user on a budget: it is an honest product that can be found as low as USD 56. If you’d like a product that is better, we recommend OCZ StealthXStream 600 W, which provides more SATA power cables. In fact the reduced number of SATA power cables is the only real motive we are giving this product our “Silver Award” instead of “Golden Award.”

Keep also in mind that there are several other power supplies that are internally identical to MSI Turbostream 600 W (see a complete list on the first page) and they should get the same performance as the reviewed model.

In summary, comments saying bad things about this power supply on forums around the web are pure speculation, based solely on Solytech’s past and not
on actual testings. Of course there are better 600 W units around, if you have the money to buy them. If you don’t, this unit is a very good choice if you have only up to USD 70 to spend on a power supply.

Some questions, however, remain answered: why MSI chose Solytech as their vendor? Why MSI gives such short warranty? Why MSI entered the power supply market offering low-end models if they are better known as a tier 1 motherboard manufacturer?