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- Date:
- Wednesday, June 23, 2010
- Author:
- Paul Johnson
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
Kingwin Lazer Gold 1000W Power Supply Review
1000 watts of Gold Rated 80 Plus+ power is not something that you find in the PSU market every day, but with the new GPUs swallowing mass amounts of power, the PSU guys are going to have to step up with better units. Kingwin does exactly that with its new "Lazer" unit, the LZG-1000.
Overview
The first thing we are going to look at with the Kingwin LZG-1000 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 packaging of the Kingwin Lazer Gold series is a bit different from what we have seen from previous efforts from Kingwin. The box itself is mostly black with a large flap on top that covers how you open the box. On the exterior we find the usual assortment of advertising points as well as a number of certifications and seals. Among these certifications are an 80Plus Gold seal from which the product line derives the new addendum to its previous name. A quick check of the 80Plus website does indeed turn up the LZG-1000 specifications as being certified for 80Plus gold. Noticeably absent from the packaging however, is any sort of multi-GPU certification. This was also the case when we checked with both the SLIZone website and the ATI CrossfireX website. However, the older 1000W Mach 1 units are rated for GTX 470 SLI and given the paper specifications of this unit (reproduced below) it would seem that this unit should be able to achieve much the same in regards to multi-GPU support. The remaining point of real interest to users on the box here is that the unit is advertised as having a 3 year warranty. This is certainly better than the 1 year warranty we saw when we first reviewed a Kingwin power supply, but it is still seriously lacking in the high-end enthusiast market place.
The paper specifications for the Kingwin LZG-1000 are interesting and a bit different from the previous LZ-1000. While the previous LZ-1000 was listed as having six 12v rails it really was only three 12v rails according to Kingwin's representatives, and even that seems unlikely. The new LZG-1000 does away with that quandary by going with a single 12v rail rated at an impressive 83A or over 99% of the unit's total possible DC output capacity if needed. Along with this new 12v arrangement we get a very small 120W total capacity for the minor rails, 5v and 3.3v, combined. True modern systems use less from these rails in general so this should not be an issue most of the time, but don't try and power some old 5v heavy system with this unit for some reason! Coupled with this power arrangement we find that the unit comes equipped with three 6-pin PCI-Express connectors and three 8-pin PCI-Express connectors along with a total of nineteen peripheral connectors (9 Molex and 10 SATA). This represents an increase of three over the previous LZ-1000 we reviewed and this unit should be sufficient to run most tri-SLI systems. Tri-SLI GTX-480 configurations with high end CPUs with overclocking thrown in might need to scale up a bit more.
Once we open the Kingwin LZG-1000 we see the contents mirror those of all previous Kingwin products we have reviewed. There is the power supply itself, the power cord, mounting screws, manual, and the modular cables. The manual with this unit is 6 page long (in English) and provides some information about the unit including the basic electrical specifications, some troubleshooting steps, and basic features of the unit. The warranty information is once more MIA. Overall the manual is ok, but certainly not great. Let's move on now and see what this unit looks like once we open it up.