Enermax MAXREVO 1350w PSU Review

 

Internals and Cables

Today’s internal photographs are provided by Mr Logan, who I might add required a couple of swigs of the ol’ Dutch courage before making his first venture into PSU disassembly. Of course, the fact that I was standing behind him making loud “bzzzzzzzzzzt!!!” noises whenever his screwdriver came remotely close to any of the components probably didn’t help. Sorry mate!

  

Anyway, the birds-eye view of the MAXREVO reveals a very well arranged collection of components with four amusingly small heatsinks. They are of course small for a reason, and that reason is more than likely because the efficiency of the MAXREVO ensures that little energy is lost as heat. This hasn’t stopped Enermax from fitting a chuffin’ great 14cm fan to the unit though capable of shifting 93cfm of air when at full tilt. But hopefully during the testing we’ll find the 30dbA noise form this beat suitably muted.

A rather chunky transformer sits right in the middle of the unit and is responsible for the step-down from mains voltage to +12v. From here, a separate daughter-board mounted vertically in front of the modular connector backplane further reduces the voltage down to +3.3v and +5v for the rest of the connectors. Enermax should be given a pat on the back for this REVOlutionary design, as it removes the need for a rather large bunch of cables to be run from the secondary side of the PSU over to the modular connectors. This not only frees up valuable space within the unit, but also improves airflow.

As promised Enermax has installed some tasty Japanese capacitors. Over on the primary side with have a row of three caps manufactured by Panasonic and rated at 330uF / 400V / 105°C, whereas the secondary side has a row of 10 Rubycon capacitors rated at 1500uf / 16v. Also pictured above is a rather beefy EMI mains filter, which not only acts as the first line of defence against noise from other devices plugged into the same mains loop, but also prevents any noise exiting the PSU.

  

 

Moving on to the cables and connectors, we can see that Enermax has shipped the MAXREVO with quite a reasonable selection. As you’d expect all cables are sleeved, but unfortunately the quality of the sleeving falls below what I’d consider acceptable for such a high-end unit. For example, both the ATX and EPS connectors have over 5″ of exposed cables at the ends which will spoil the look of many a modified PC. Additionally a lot of the sleeving on the cables is quite saggy and I think it could well be time for Enermax to move on to some plain coloured sleeving as the red and yellow stripes are unlikely to match any PC colour schemes.

In terms of what you actually get though, the MAXREVO is quite impressive. Fourteen SATA connectors, ten molex connectors, eight PCI-E connectors, three motherboard power connectors and a partridge in a pear tree!

Now on to the testing…