But what does that mean? The Power Efficiency of a power supply? First and foremost; the higher the better, efficiency is good. 

When power is drawn from your wall socket and travels into your power supply, not all of it is transformed into electricity that your computer consumes. A rather large part of that current will get lost as there is heat that is dissipating in the capacitors or leakage in circuits and other losses. So it boils down to this: If your computer requires 500 watts of power, a power supply will draw more than that from your electric company. Here's an example:

If you have a generic power supply with an average 70% efficiency a 350 power draw (350/70x100) watt load would mean it is drawing 500 watts of current from your wall socket while your PC only uses 350 watts, interesting eh?

Let's do that math again , yet this time with a 80% power efficiency in mind: 350/80x100= 438 Watt. So that's saving 64 Watts over a 70% efficient product. If you have your PC powered on a lot , think about this theory and what it can save you in the long term.

Now if we estimate that this PSU has a 87% efficiency 350/85x100=402 Watt. We save 98 Watts by just choosing a better power supply.

Let's place that in a table:

	PSU Efficiency in % 350W baseline 70 500 75 467 80 438 85 412 87 402 88 398 89 393 90 389

The higher the efficiency the less power loss, the less money you have to pay. And hey ... it's good for mother nature as well. I find energy efficiency one of the most important developments in a PSU this and coming year, we'll monitor this closely.

[Ed - Depending on your energy supplier, country of origin etc, you will pay approx 15p(UK)/€0.21(EU)/$0.30(US) per unit. A device using a kilo watt of power for one hour is a kWh or a unit of energy. At the moment we are seeing increasingly expensive energy costs in gas and electricity. So getting more efficient equipment, or going greener in general should actually save you money.

Keep this in perspective though, your 70% eff 600W PSU which was probably cheap lets say €40 trying to pull 350W (so thats 500W in real terms). Compare that to our 87% 1200W PSU on test today €235 trying to pull the same 350W (thats approx 400W in real terms). 100W difference per hour is a cost difference of €0.021. To break even, we'd have to run these PCs continuously for 386 days / 9285 hours. If energy prices go up, obviously the time it takes to break even comes down. ]

So next to being a really capable, this is an efficient PSU.

Active PFC
This model has a very nice feature called Active PFC. To put it in simple terms, Active PFC PSUs are more expensive and, from a power consumption point of view, more efficient. Power Factor Correction (PFC) allows power distribution to operate at its highest efficiency. There are two types of PFC, Active PFC and Passive PFC. This PSU has Active PFC. Active PFC uses a circuit to correct power factor, Active PFC is able to generate a theoretical power factor of over 95%. Active Power Factor Correction also markedly diminishes total harmonics, automatically corrects for AC input voltage, and is capable of a full range of input voltage. Since Active PFC is the more complex method of Power Factor Correction, it is definitely more expensive to produce an Active PFC power supply.

Warranty
The PSU has a 3 year warranty quite nice. Alright ... let's have a look at the photo shoot followed by some testing.