BFG EX 1200 Power Supply review | test - Introduction

Many moons ago, a night in December so dark and cold, I walked a path ages old, we lived in an era where power supplies failed reasonably often as quickly ... they turned old.

Such a shame really as the PSU inside your computer is what your heart is to your body. In a stable and efficient manner it tries to deliver current to the components which need that juice. As such the PSU many many moons ago was a very underestimated product.

Roughly a year or three ago we as media started to pay more and more attention towards power supplies, the overall power demand inside the PC was rising and failing PSUs were considered to be normal, as they did fail more often than not. Ever since we as media gave the PSU more awareness things progressed fast .. real fast. The PSU got so much attention that it became a trendy thing to own. We moved from dull grey, towards colored PSUs, we added modular designs and phrases like cable management became a hip thing, cables all of a sudden got sleeved. We also entered an era where power consumption became an issue. PSUs as such grew fast in wattage on one side, yet on the other side we wanted green, and thus PSU efficiency went up. Where we are today is a market that has been stabilizing for the past year or so. Where every review website had a PSU review at least once a week, you now see PSU reviews on a much smaller scale.

This is a direct results of two things, a saturated market and a certain comfort zone for the end user. Most of you bought a beefy 400 to 600 Watt class power supply of which roughly half are modular. Plenty of spare wattage for the future combined with a much better lifespan. When you have to purchase a new PSU the choices are pretty extreme. More high end enthusiast gamers and PC builders go for 650 Watts and above PSUs, and the choice in brands is enormous. Which is interesting as worldwide there are less 'real' PSU manufacturers then the total number of fingers on both of your hands. Yes everybody outsources, BFG we think is doing their booty thang with Andyson.

We are Guru3D, and we typically have a weird rare fetish for the more high-end gear. Heck we're even proud of that. You guys are the ones with Crossfire or SLI based setups, the gals and blokes that are tweaking and overclocking hardware .. we want maximum performance on the Guru scale of 10. On that similar note a year or two ago I started using the Enermax Galaxy class PSUs here for our review systems. These babies are 1 kilowatt a piece. Overkill you ask? ...  sure, but not once in all these years have they failed me while delivering a stable and sturdy flow of current to my precious and expensive computer components.

As such I like Kilowatt PSUs, and really .. there aren't many manufacturers out there which I would buy a Kilowatt PSU from and then go extreme on the system. Enermax fits the description, Corsair and lately BFG are the names high on top in my little black book. Ever since BFG launched power supplies they have done nothing other then astound me. Especially their ES series is downright stunning. And with each new model they improve over and over again. The first model was maybe a tad too noisy, the second model we tested we figured had it's cabling a little too short, and then last week BFG dropped a mail asking if we wanted to test their all new BFG 1200 Watt EX power supply. A power supply that is silent, efficient, has long cabling, is pure quality, has an ATX size chassis, is completely themed dark and perhaps after all these years might be able to replace my kilowatt PSUs. As what BFG is bringing to the table is comforting. This 1200 Watt  piece of machinery is fairly close to what I consider perfection in terms of design and requirements .. and with a price just under 250 USD, BFG might have something really special on their hands. And that my friends makes it very interesting.

Have a peek and then let's dive into the review.