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  Manufacturers: I-Star
Enermax
  Products: TC-500R8A (500W)
EG651P-VE (550W)
  Availability: Now
  Authors:

Pieter (dutchcedar) Bijleveld
John (flashawk) Smith

  Date: 3-25-03
  Price: TC-500R8A: $526.40
EG651P-VE: $140.00

Discuss this review in our forums

There are 5 parts to this review, please use the pulldown below to browse sections or simply hit "Next" at the bottom of each section to continue


Introduction

Power supplies are not very exciting components for most of us. They just sit somewhere in the back of our PC's making noise, hosting the maze of wires that impress our friends because we actually know where to plug them in. The power supply just gets no respect.

When building powerful PC's however, we have to take them a little more seriously. The poor selection of a power supply or the choice of an underpowered one can lead to serious problems with our systems. Embarking on the build of a rather serious dual AMD Opteron liquid cooled RAID0 workstation is what made me take a closer look when selecting a power supply. The candidates I chose for this rig are both monsters, the 500 watt I-Star TC-500R8A and the 550 watt Enermax EG651P-VE.

 
The 500 watt I-Star TC-500R8A
 
The 550 watt Enermax EG651P-VE
(shown upside down)
 

Although these are 500W and 550W power supplies respectively, this is where the similarities end. I have had great success with Enermax units in the past, so it was only natural to take a serious look at one of their latest offerings. While the Enermax unit is conventional in design, the I-Star blows the lid off of what we expect a power supply to look like and what we expect it to do.

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The I-Star is actually two 500W power supplies sitting on top of each other in hot swap bays. Each of these units has its own AC input, and therefore, can operate alone at the full 500W output if its partner fails. When they are paired together however, they each operate at 50%, which should add to the life expectancy of each. It is the added reliability and redundancy from this design that originally sparked my interest. My concerns were the potential for it to be noisy and how efficient its cooling system might be. We will look closely at both of these concerns in this review, putting it head to head with the Enermax unit.


How Big is Big?

Both of these power supplies are 3-3/8 inches (86mm) tall and 5-7/8 inches (150mm) wide, so they slide nicely into the throat of our LianLi PC-60's PSU rack. But they aren't short in the length department. The Enermax is a full 5-1/2 inches (150mm) long while the I-Star is a whopping 7-7/8 inches (200mm) in length. Considering that the latter is really two power supplies in one, it's rather amazing that the folks at I-Star were able to fit everything into such a compact package. When installed in our LianLi PC-60, the front of the unit interfered with the top plate exhaust fan. Either the fan must be moved or the power supply must be left to protrude about ¾" from the case's rear face.

 

 



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