Enermax Pro87+ 600W

The Enermax Pro87+ 600W is one of few 600W power supplies that are 80+ certified at the Gold level. We have put together a high-end system and tested the Pro87+ to see if it has more going for it than just a certification.

INTRODUCTION

Power supplies of course are one of the most important pieces of a computer and one component where quality is extremely important, at least if you are a serious user with some high-end components in the computer. We have unfortunately seen too many computers get unstable or even worse, go up in smoke, when a no-name PSU has buckled under the load.

Enermax is a company that is known for their high quality PSU’s and today we are looking at a new product from them: the PRO87+ 600W CrossFireX™. As the name suggests this is a 600W PSU with a high efficiency rate (87% and better) which also happens to be certified for CrossfireX.

THE SPECIFICATIONS

High efficiency

The Enermax Pro 87+ is an impressive speced power supply. As the name implies it has been 80+ certified with the Gold level. This means that the efficiency must be 88%/92%/88% at 20/50/100% load for a 230V PSU and 87%/90%87% for a 115V PSU. A high efficiency means less wasted power = saving money.

The efficiency of a computer power supply is its output power divided by its input power. The remaining power is converted into heat. For instance, a 600-watt power supply with 60% efficiency running at full load would draw 1000W from the mains and would therefore waste 400W as heat. On the other hand a 600-watt power supply with 80% efficiency running at full load would draw 750W from the mains and would therefore waste only 150W as heat. (source: Wikipedia)

CrossfireX-certified and certified by AMD for GAME! Ready systems!

The PSU is certified for AMD multi-GPU configurations. Oddly enough Enermax hasn’t certified it with NVIDIA for SLI but we are 100% certain that it works just fine. In fact, we’ve so far never encountered a PSU that hasn’t worked well on both CrossfireX and SLI.

ATX12V v2.3 support

The PSU supports all the new CPU’s from AMD and Intel including Intel® Core™ 2 Duo/Quad/Extreme/i7/i5, and AMD® Athlon™ 64X2 & Phenom™ II.

SpeedGuard

The built-in fan can go as slow as 330 RPM up to 1000 RPM.

Twister fan

13.9cm Twister-bearing fan with low noise and long lifetime. (100,000 hours MTBF, Patented)

HeatGuard

The PUS is kept running for 30-60 seconds after shutdown to dissipate any remaining system heat.

SafeGuard

The PSU of course has all sorts of protection circuitry like OCP, OVP, AC UVP, DC UVP, OPP, OTP, SCP & SIP.

The Enermax Pro 87+ has 3 12V-rails that combined can handle 50A.
 

CLOSER LOOK

The Enermax Pro 87+ is a cool looking power supply.

What stands out right away is the gold-plated fan inside. Enermax of course did this to show off that this is a Gold 80+ certified power supply and it really looks cool. The fan is one of Enermax Twister-fans and it can rotate at a speed as slow as 330 rpm and up to 1000 rpm.

This is not a modular power supply meaning that all the cables are attached to the PSU. If you prefer modular cables you should instead look at the Modu87+ which looks to be the same power supply with modular cables.

The cables included are:

• 24 pin mainboard (55 cm)
• 4+4pin CPU (60 cm)
• 4 x 6+2-pin PCI-E (2x 45 cm and 2x 50 cm)
• 7 x SATA
• 6 x Molex
• 1x FDD

Yes, you heard right. This power supply comes with four 8-pin PCI-E cables. This is impressive as many 500-600W power supplies only come with one 8-pin connector. Other than that we get a lot of SATA and Molex-connectors, enough for even the biggest system.
 

PERFORMANCE

While we would like one day to be able to afford a big nice testing rig where we can put any load we want on a PSU we unfortunately at this moment have to do our testing the hard way: by using high-performance components to create a load on the PSU.

The system we used to test this power supply was:

• AMD Phenom™ X6 1090T with a TDP at 125W and clocked at 3.2 GHz (Turbo Core at 3.6 GHz)
• Noctua NH-C12 cooler
• 4 GB OCZ Black Edition DDR3 @ 1600 MHz
• ASUS Crosshair IV Formula
• 640 GB SATA6 Western Digital Caviar Black HDD
• 300 GB Western Digital VelociRaptor HDD
• XFX HD5870 Eyefinity Edition 2 GB video card + Reference HD5870 Eyefinity Edition 2GB Video card

According to the eXtreme Power Supply Calculator (http://extreme.outervision.com/PSUEngineI) this setup should need about 550W+ (they do not have the exact same components yet to choose from but we know that a Eyefinity HD5870 needs about 25W more power than regular HD5870 at full load) of power which gives us a good load to test this power supply with.

We tested the power supply with the system at idle (Windows desktop) and high load (PSU-test in OCCP 3.1 Perestrojka + HDD-copying at the same time).

The various voltages were measured at the 24-pin connector with a multimeter and plotted in software.

Idle

As expected the Enermax Pro 87+ has no problems providing the motherboard with stable voltage well within the ATX-specifications as we have a low load on the system.

High load

The 3.3V and 5V rails no longer are used that much since the ATX2.0 specifications specified that the 12V-rails would be used to power most components in the system. Thus we are not surprised that the voltage is stable on both these rails during high load. We see ~1% drop in voltage on both rails which is negligible.

So how does the power supply handle the load on the 12V-rails? Remember that we are using two Eyefinity-edition HD5870 cards which both need need power from a 6-pin and a 8-pin PCI-E-connector as well as a nice 6-core AMD Phenom II CPU. The answer is that the Enermax Pro 87+ handles it great. The 12V rail go from 12.15V to 12.08-12.09V which is a drop of around 0.5%. That is pretty amazing. Even more important is that the voltage is stable and not spiking or dropping further during the test. We’ve seen a lot of “good” power supplies where the voltage on the 12V-rails has fluctuated a lot during load.

Power

We measured the power draw at the wall. This gives us the total wattage that the system draws excluding the monitor.

Idle: 100W
High load: 611W

As expected we get a nice high power-consumption when we put a high load on the system. This shows us that we are indeed taxing the power supply and testing it at its upper “limits” (it is actually specified to handle wattage above 600W). It is unfortunate that we cannot calculate directly how much the components need so we can calculate the actual efficiency but that is something we will aim to do in the future. From the theoretical power need we calculated with the eXtreme Power Supply Calculator it looks like we are seeing efficiency around 90% which is what we expect.

Noise level

The Twister fan works well and keeps the power supply cool while not making much sound. When the system is running at a low load the power supply is basically noise less. As the load goes up the fan spins up but even then the power supply is very quiet and the noise it makes is easily overshadowed by the noise from other components. Considering the load we put on the power supply it is impressive that it can be so quiet.
 

OUR CONLUSION

We really like the Enermax Pro 87+. It is a high quality power supply that has no problems providing our system with stable power even when we add high performance components in it. A lot of people think that you need 800W or more when you use of the high-end AMD or NVIDIA cards and that probably is true if using a low-quality power supply but a high quality power supply like the Enermax Pro 87+ have no problems handling those cards.
The Enermax Pro 87+ comes with lots of nice features, like various protection circuits, but it is the fact that we get four 8-pin PCI-E connectors that we like the most. Most companies only include 2 PCI-E connectors and if there are more it usually is of the 6-pin variety.

If we have to complain on something it has to be price. This is an expensive power supply, partly because Enermax of course want to capitalize that there are not many Gold 80+ certified 600W power supplies but partly also because few places are selling it. When it was released the MSRP was around $155 and while we do not know if it has dropped we found the power supply at Newegg for 139.99$ which is better. A Corsair HX650, a great power supply that might only be Bronze 80+ certified but still is of great quality, goes for $120 so you have to think if better efficiency is worth the extra money. In Europe it is even more expensive. Here in Sweden you can get a Enermax Pro 87+ for 1700 SEK (~170€) while the Corsair HX650 costs around 115€ making the Enermax Pro 87+ a hard sell even though it is a very good power supply.