Seasonic X-Series 650W 80+ Gold Certified PC Power Supply Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2010-05-08
·
1,615 words · ~8 min read
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So today we're going to be having a look at the cic X Series 650 W power supply
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now the front of this box is pretty bare as you may or may not have noticed it
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features Advanced DC power conversion technology for blah blah blah blah blah
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and it is 80 plus gold that is the real
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draw for this power supply Series right there so that means power supply
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efficiency of 87% or more regardless of
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the load on it so that's pretty awesome actually you should check out my video
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that I did recently on my NCI .c Channel where we talked about how much money you
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can save in a year by using an 80 plus gold power supply so you can see this
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power supply has a single 12volt rail at 54 amps and it's capable of outputting
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almost its entire 650 wat maximum on the
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12vt rail let's move around to the back where all of a sudden the box design
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gets a lot busier so they show you a little bit of the internal design of the
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X Series 650 watt they talk a little bit about their DC connector module with
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integrated vrm voltage regulator module there is your 80 plus gold spec so that
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means it's 8790 87% at 2050 and 100%
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operating loads so as high as 90% um in
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what I would consider a typical gaming system which would top out around 300
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watts under load okay silent fan control this is a big thing for seic is they
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typically have very very quiet power supplies so they're using a Sano Deni
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San pwm silent fan let me see this is a
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fully modular it looks like like no it couldn't be this is a modular power
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supply looks like it might be fully modular you know what we're going to have to open it up to find out so why
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don't we just do that it's SLI certified
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also I didn't mention that before and oh it's not even sealed Okay cool so first
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we'll find an owner's manual which reemphasizes it is 80 plus gold okay
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it's in five different languages and gives us the basics tells us thank you
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for purchasing I didn't purchase one but you know you're you're welcome anyway uh
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gives you a little bit of information about the connectors that are connected
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to it they don't give you the rail breakdown because because it's a single
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rail power supply on the 12 VTS so you
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don't have to worry about what you're plugging in where and whether it's going
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to overload a single rail okay they talk about their 5-year warranty a little bit
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are simple and effective oh and they even tell you how to do an RMA if you
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have a DOA unit that's really nice of them to include that information okay so
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then we've got a little fold out thing here let's see Sonic logo very nice box
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I really like it okay then we have have wow this is hey this is nice go for gold
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and just in time for the Olympics too um X Series okay see Sonic it's got two
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separate little oh wow this is two separate little baggies which each
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include modular cables I'm just going to dump these
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out yes there we go okay so this is fully modular let's pull the power
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supply out we've got a pretty beefy looking power cord just your standard
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computer power cord all right then we have a little seic case badge power by
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cic and four case screws just in case your case doesn't include the case
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screws if that's the case
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then well okay that joke got old really
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fast okay so it comes in a little velvet bag which makes it feel very high-end
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which it is by the way I mean it's an 80 plus gold 650 wat unit that should be
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all you really need to know and it's kind of got a unique look to it okay the
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first thing you'll notice is that the accents are in kind of a Goldie sort of
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finish so you've got your basic specs here all of your safety certifications
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all of your testing all on this side of the unit then at the front you will find
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the fully modular interface and I'm going to go ahead and oh this is weird
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look at this so they've actually got the 24 pin connector Consolidated down to
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only 16 pins so that means that many of
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the duplicated cables are probably each plugging into just one pin because it
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wouldn't matter because it's a single rail power supply very interesting so
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here we've got our peripheral IDE and SATA connectors all along here up here
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is our PCI Express and CPU 8 Pin okay
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here we have CPU and here we have motherboard all right so we'll figure
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out what all of that means in a moment oh yeah down here we have the 120 mm pwm
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fan okay temperature activated fan rotates
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only when required right because a very efficient power supply only needs to
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turn on the fan when it gets overwhelmed and since it's a fairly low wattage very
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efficient power supply it's going to mean that you've got far less excess
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heat than you would have in a less efficient unit so that fan probably
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doesn't have to work very hard at all on the back of the unit you find your
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typical honeygom grill with a power switch and a power input for the power
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cable then on this side you'll find some seic branding with the X Series go for
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gold branding there as well wow I'm really tired today this is uh I'm
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repeating myself awful lot but what are you going to do okay let's see if I can
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figure out how to get this open there we go so
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here is the oh so they didn't they didn't actually consolidate this cable
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down what they've done is they've made two separate cables for some reason okay
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so basically you plug it in like this and then you plug it in like this I
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cannot imagine why they've done it this way but they did I sure there's a reason
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for it somewhere and I don't know what
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it is so that's your 24 pin cable and here if you want to shift the angle
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there so it's reasonably long you're not going to have trouble with this power supply having any sort of short cable
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problems where you can't actually reach the important parts of your PC all right
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let's look at what else we have included for modular cabl so you got a four pin
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CPU connector then you have oh this is
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great I I love these the the ones that are sort of a single brick that you plug
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in so this is for PC PCI Express and then that goes out to two 6 plus2 pin
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PCI Express connectors so you've got two of those so you can actually C Sonic has
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configured it so you can easily run two high-end graphics cards requiring as
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many as two 8 Pin PCI Express connectors
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each off of this power supply so this cable right
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here oh no maybe they haven't oh I see
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what they've done so either you're using four wow you know what this is one of
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the most confusing modular interfaces I've seen uh ever okay I get it so you
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can either have an 8 Pin CPU power
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connector here and then you can add a second one and then you can have only
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two PCI Express connectors or you can
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run a motherboard that requires only a single eight pin and then you can have
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as many as four PCI Express connectors so they're limiting you with the
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connectors a little bit to make sure that you don't go ahead and over load
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this with like you know that new EVGA board that has two LGA 1366 sockets and
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supports like seven graphics cards you wouldn't want to be running that on a
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650 W power supply so they're protecting consumers a little bit that way all
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right so in terms of the other modular cables we have we've got one with three
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SATA another one with three SATA another one probably with three SATA I'm
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guessing yeah there's another one so you can connect up to oh no that one has
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only two so you can connect up to eight SATA hard drives natively on this power
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supply and then I'm going to go see what I dropped here oh okay this is an
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adapter oh okay so they haven't actually included any floppy connectors on the
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modular cables by default but you can use this adapter to get a couple floppy
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connectors if you want that then we have
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eight four pin Molex connectors so you
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can plug in as many as five Al together
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of the Molex and SATA connectors thank you for checking out my unboxing of the
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cic X Series 8 plus gold power supply