350-450W Roundup: 11 Cheap PSUs

Some of you have suggested to review a few PSUs with 350W to 450W. Therefore we picked a collection of such units from well known and unknown manufacturers and tortured them with our overload tests. Read on to find out who delivers the best performance.

~400W is still plenty even for a midrange system, and with optimal efficiency generally coming at 50% load these power supplies should run closer to their "sweet spot" when idle as well as under load. There's still enough power on top to run a Core i7 or Phenom X6 processor and a discrete GPU.

Corsair CX430 V2 430W -1
Comments Locked

67 Comments

View All Comments

  • Scootiep7 - Thursday, July 5, 2012 - link

    What, no Cooler Master GX 450W Bronze? I CALL SHENANIGANS SIRS! A recount must be done.
  • nubie - Friday, July 6, 2012 - link

    I still love my PC Power and Cooling Silencer 470, from before they were bought up by (forget right now).

    Of course at over $100 it really needs to be worth it, but I have seen some on the 'Bay for $30 or so.

    Too bad that PC Power didn't have a lower power supply in this test, I would have liked to see how they measure up.
  • betam4x - Saturday, July 7, 2012 - link

    I would even go so far as to say 1 KW power supplies aren't needed for most configurations. Running a Core i7 2600k, 16 GB RAM, 6 Hard Drives/SSDs (2x2TB WD Blacks, 2x1TB WD blacks, 1x1 TB Seagate, and 1xSSD 256 GB Force GT) as well as a radeon 6970. under load i pull 400 watts from a 650 watt PS. A bit more than the review mentions, but most people would swear they need a 1 KW ps for this setup.
  • veri745 - Monday, July 9, 2012 - link

    I, for one, would really appreciate some more comparison charts with all of the PSU's stacked up against eachother. You don't need every data point but a summary of at least idle and load, like maybe 50W and 400W, or 20% and 100%, would be much appreciated.

    Something so I don't have to flip through 9 pages to compare ripple, efficiency, noise, and PFC
  • Pappnaas - Tuesday, July 10, 2012 - link

    Again a review by Mr. Kaffei.

    And again you didn't give any information about the size of your reviewed psu's.

    In my view you did not do your homework. You omitted basic facts by not listing the physical dimensions of your reviewed objects. Anandtech tries to keep up a nearly scientific approach to their other reviews.

    Would you omit the measures if reviewing a computer case? A smartphone? A NAS-Box? A car? A TV?

    I brought this point up in several comments, alas to no avail.

    I think you're shooting yourself in the knee.

    Switch to german:

    Wenn grundlegende Dinge wie Maße fehlen, wie vertrauenswürdig ist das ganze Werk? Wissenschaftliche Arbeit fängt bei der Beschreibung der Testobjekte an.

    Wenn also die Grundlagen wissenschaftlicher Methodik verletzt werden, dann stelle ich fest, dass Anandtech die sich selbst auferlegte "professionelle Arbeitsweise" nicht einhält. Sicher ist das ein wenig Haarspalterei, werden einige sagen. Meine Einstellung: Macht es richtig oder gar nicht. Sonst droht Euer Niveau auf das der PC-Welt zurück zu fallen.
  • Bambooz - Sunday, May 5, 2013 - link

    Dein Niveau (wenn man das noch so nennen kann) ist wohl schon auf unter PC-Welt gerutscht. So richtung Computerbild..
  • zoblace - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link

    http://www.plugloadsolutions.com/psu_reports/THERM...
    ....on that page they tested Thermaltake Smart 430 and it acheived 80+ Bronze eff. no problem....
    after that could we trust online tests at all....

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now