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- Date:
- Thursday , December 10, 2009
- Author:
- Paul Johnson
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
XFX Black Edition 850W Power Supply Review
XFX jumps into the PSU market at the 850 watt mark which has proven to be the toughest watermark for many manufacturers when it comes to building a truly outstanding power supply. We have seen many fail here. Can XFX pull it off and continue to diversify its product lines while keeping the trust of the enthusiast?
Overview
The first thing we are going to look at with the XFX Black Edition 850W is its packaging, accessories, and documentation. While normally none of these items is a make or break item for a power supply the packaging quite often contains a lot of information about the product we are purchasing. The inclusion of an owner’s manual that provides actual information about our product is also of great help. Accessories are almost unnecessary with a power supply as the unit is self contained, unless it is modular, but there are cases where a manufacturer can include useful accessories to make installation, routing, and use more efficient.
The very large packaging for the XFX Black Edition 850W is trimmed out in black and sci-fi green. Certainly no one strolling down the aisle at Fry's or what not is going to miss this on the shelf even if they try too. The eye grabbing packaging includes the power label (reproduced below), safety certifications, SLI ready seal, 80Plus Silver seal, connector count, and a slew of marketing points. A quick check of the SLIZone website turns up a certification for 8800GTX SLI. That level of SLI certification seems very low for this units capacity and pedigree. Perhaps the SLI listing is in error? Even if it is not, this unit should be capable of powering much more power hungry SLI setups than that if the paper numbers come true. Moving on to the 80Plus website, we find that the XFX Black Edition 850W is indeed certified for 80Plus Silver. This is nothing to sneeze at and again something we will be able to look at later. Lastly, the Black Edition backed by a 5 year warranty which is certainly good, but we wouldn't complain if it was longer like some other high end units sport.
As we see from the above information above the XFX Black Edition 850W is almost identical to the Seasonic M12D-850 it is based on. The Black Edition 850W has the same high 12v capacity, relative to the unit’s total DC output capacity, of 70A (~99% of the unit’s output capacity) on a single 12v rail. This change from two 12v rails to one marks the only real difference between these two units in the electrical specifications. Continuing to follow in the M12D-850's footsteps, we find that the unit comes equipped with eight Molex and eight SATA connectors to make use of the unit’s generous 12v capacity along with the unit’s 4 PCI-Express connectors. These factors should all make this unit a well equipped 850W power supply that can physically support the vast majority of enthusiasts gaming systems.
Once we open the Black Edition 850W box we find a rather convoluted packaging method that ultimately leaves us with the power supply, the power cable, mounting screws, modular cables in a bag, and the user manual. The user manual that comes with the Black Edition 850W is one sheet of paper folded into thirds and printed on both sides. Included in the manual is the power table, the connector count, some basic installation instructions, a map of the modular interface, pinouts, and some marketing points. We see among those marketing points that the unit is advertised as being rated at 50C which is higher than the M12D-850 which was rated at 40C. All this information makes the only important information missing from the manual the warranty information beyond the length of said warranty. As such the very brief XFX manual is mostly useful with a lot of the very basic information we would expect to find from a good unit with good support, but it lacks some of the more detailed information we find from some other brands.