Conclusions
Contents
This is an old ATX power supply where the manufacturer added a 24-pin motherboard connector, SATA power cables and a PCI Express auxiliary power cable to make it compatible with computers available today. Simply updating the cables doesn’t make this power supply an updated product. This is so true that this power supply is listed as ATX12V 1.03 by Thermaltake, and not as ATX12V 2.x, despite the presence of the 24-pin motherboard connector and the 6-pin PCI Express auxiliary power cable for video cards.
The main problem with this power supply is that it can’t deliver its labeled power. It is, in fact, a 350 W power supply.
This same thing happens with Huntkey Green Star 450 W, but at least this power supply from Thermaltake has all its overload protection in place and won’t explode like this model from Huntkey.
If these power supplies can’t deliver their labeled power couldn’t we sue the manufacturer on the grounds of false advertisement? Unfortunately no, as the manufacturers can claim they use a different methodology to label their product (for example, measuring power at 25° C and stating peak power and not continuous power). We, however, think that the correct methodology should be one similar to ours (temperature between 45° C and 50° C, continuous power).
You could buy it as if it were a 350 W unit, but when we pulled 355 W from this power supply noise level was touching the maximum admissible limit and efficiency was at 69.6%. With other load patterns the maximum efficiency we saw was 76.9%.
Our conclusion is pretty simple: don’t buy this power supply. If you are on budget and are looking for a cheap power supply on the 450 W range for your entry-level PC, Kingwin ABT-450MM is a better option.
