The Enermax Galaxy 1000W Power Supply (Fig. 1) is one of the largest around but is the kind of unit needed to handle the latest crop of quad core motherboards especially ones that will sport multiple x16 PCI Express video adapters and hard disk arrays with up to 24 drives. It is about four inches longer than the typical power supply so make sure your case will handle it. It is possible that a smaller case will not allow easy access to drives in the top slots. Our Enermax case had plenty of room.
The extra space this monster occupies is used to house some major features such as three transformers and a dual tier architecture that separates the motherboard power generation from the peripherals. There are five independent 12-V rails, a first. It is also the first 2007 EPS12V Compliant design.
It also has a pair of fans. The large 13.5-cm intake fan (Fig. 2) provides large air volume movement with minimum noise generation.
The Galaxy 1000W has top quality cables coming out to the motherboard and peripherals but it also has an array of connectors (Fig. 3) on its backside that accept individual plug-in cables to handle more devices. This allows a mix and match approach using cables specific (Fig. 4) to the kind of device that is being serviced.
Also included is support for a dedicated RAM power cable needed on 32- to 64-Gbyte systems as well as the usual drive power cables for IDE/SCSI and SATA devices. It was very handy for our system with two PCI Express video cards, the Ageia PhysX PCI adapter that required additional power in addition to a pair of Seagate SATA hard drives.
The 4-pin molex connector used with IDE and SCSI drives includes a locking feature.
The system has its own power tracking system called Power Guard. There is a status LED and internal buzzer much like that found on a motherboard but this handles things before it gets to the motherboard. It is capable of shutting down the unit in abnormal power situations. The system also adjusts to input voltages from 90-240 Vac and it has active power factor correction support.
The system is designed to hit 85% efficiency even while keeping the system cool and quiet. The unit is priced at $339. The Galaxy 1000W is also a good choice for heavy duty embedded systems that will have a number of PCI Express boards.
www.enermax.com