Final Words & Conclusion
Final Words & Conclusion
The MasterWatt maker series is a power supply the surprised me positively, but it aint perfect alright. Prior to testing the unit I read up some reviews on it, where it got critiqued on low power efficiency. Power supplies these days are examined literally piece by piece and then again by piece. As such there is a huge magnifying glass upon these reviews. One media outlet however disqualifies this power supply for being not efficient enough below 75 Watts, where throughout the rest of the load measurements the PSU is highly efficient. I am not pointing fingers as these are all valid arguments and even facts, but perhaps some media outlets have become a little to critical? If you zoom in at such reviews you'll notice that under roughly 60 Watts this power supply will drop in efficiency levels big-time. If you remain above that range then it's all good, really good. I am a little surprised about how negative these reviews turned out for one simple reason. You do not purchase a 1200W power supply to be energy efficient at 60 Watts? Contrary, we assume you'd be hooking up a power supply like this towards something X99 / Core i7 / with at least two graphics card. Such setups in IDLE will sit at roughly 80 Watts where the power supply will be more then efficient enough. Now I am not critiquing the reviews out there as factual they are 100% right in their claims. It's just that if you purchase a KiloWatt or higher PSU, your concern most likely will not be entry-level PC power consumption. Now we hooked up the PSU towards our X99 / Core i7 5960X system as you probably have noticed in our photos. On that system with one 1080 cards installed we IDLE at 73 Watts and near 80 Watts with two cards installed. And under load this PSU is energy efficient. So overall this is comparable with any other brand. Anyway, just sayin'. Anyway, back to the conclusion :)
The Conundrum
So the bigger picture really is this, who is going to purchase a 1200 or 1500 Watt power supply anno 2016? Yeah, that's not a lot of you, eh? Perhaps pro-overclockers, but these guys get the PSU sponsored. Yes for the past two years PCs have been more and more about being energy friendly. Typically if you max out at 500 Watts on a PC (load power consumption) you already will have a beefy setup!. The 1200 Watt model PSU actually can make sense as at 50% load your PSy is the most efficient and thus energy friendly. The trend in hardware lately is to be more power efficient and since we test with real-world hardware... that's tough job to fulfill. Regardless, the MasterWatt obviously had no issues whatsoever with what we threw at it, in real-world testing with actual computer hardware we reached just over 700 Watt (socket side measurement) which is not even considered a stress to this PSU.
Equilibrium
Half the maximum load is the point of equilibrium for a power supply though, that's where it'll be the most efficient and in this case at 230V that is 96%. As such the 600 Watt range is actually a sweet-spot. While passing 700 Watt load we do can confirm that the power efficiency is most definitely good when we pass 700 Watt - it performed close to where it needs to be with other Platinum and Titanium tested models. At a price of 449 USD the product is very expensive though. In the EU Cooler Master already dropped the price towards 399 EURO. You do get very high efficiency levels under load, nice looks, great connectivity and of course the software suite. You will also receive a nice 7 years warranty. Stability wise we have very little to complain, voltages throughout testing remain synchronized. But we'll trust that some other reviews will show some ripple tests yet have no doubt the product will come out totally clean. Impressive is obviously the massive single +12V rail that you can enable. The default however is two 12V rails. It has much power to handle multiple heavy duty graphics cards totalling to 100 AMPs. Considering that one graphics card uses 15A on average these days you do the math. Being so efficient also translates in drop-dead stable voltage levels, obviously.
Cooler Master CONNECT
One of the nicest features of the power supply obviously is the CONNECT interface. It will allow you to monitor load value, AMPage, Efficiency, temperatures and so on. You can also configure a single or split 12V rails as well as configure fan RPM. As good as it sounds, the software is loaded with bugs. For example with Bluetooth interface absolutely irrevocably refused to connect towards the Cooler Master Connect APP. Now my S7 Edge had a proper Bluetooth connection with the dongle, yet the software kept reporting back "no device found". For Windows you simply hook up the USB cable and connect. That works properly, but here again we noticed a couple of bugs, Switching from Fahrenheit towards Degrees C would mess up the Letter C in the output. Not at all important, however manually configuring fan RPM also resulted in weird results. Putting it on overclockers mode should set a high fixed RPM, however it started ramping up and down in RPM, very irritation noise wise. We also created a manual fan profile in which we basically configured the PSU FAN to remain inactive until it would hit a 50 Degrees C temperature. No matter what we tried under a bit of load the PSU was at 35~40 Degrees C and the fan RPM still did kick in resulting into IDLE up-top 600 RPM. You can hardly hear that, but it's just now what I configured (told) it to do. So on the software side of things there are improvements to be made. Also saving a profile doesn't work and whenever you need to cold boot your PC, the profile is not activated. The state of this software is and remains poor, even after the new v1.0 revision released days ago. Not something you'd expect from a 400 EURO power supply.
Aesthetics
The MasterWatt looks great with its dark design. A word of advice however has to be the concern of length, this PSU is 20 CM deep, so make sure you have the right PC case for that. The cables are delivered in a dark black coating. The cabling itself is my main gripe really as I find them to be a big bunch of black spaghetti. Flat or sleeved would have been the way to go. Good to see is that the connectors are all black as well, albeit that HUGE ATX motherboard power connector raises some concern (see photo above). Other then that anno 2016 we do feel that modular designs are the way to go, and that's where you are in luck as well. You use what you need in terms of wiring, keeping the innards clean and tidy, plain and simple. We LOVE BTW the length of the cables.
Final words
The MasterWatt Maker 1200 (or alternatively 1500) will deliver on most fronts, it isn't perfect though. Aside from the comments I made on the lower power consumption efficient (below 70 Watts) it's overall all good otherwise really. And also, honestly I feel it got critiqued by some media a little more then it deserved. The one thing the MasterWatt Maker is not is it being cheap, you will be able to find good quality Platinum and even Titanium power supplies well under the 299 USD marker. This 1200W MasterWatt maker however will cost 449 USD / 399 EURO, and that is it's biggest conundrum as power supply wise I am cool with it all. Lovely to see is the software connectivity even trough Bluetooth (if you can get it to work). I think that most of all of us do not really care about all the monitoring stuff, but the digital ability to switch from single to dual rails or vice versa and the ability to control the FAN RPM in several deltas or even passive is a huge plus. But here again, your saved preference profiles are not activated after a cold boot though (power down and startup). So each time you start your PC you have to manually select your preferred profile again and again and again. The Cooler Master Connect software is going to need a few updates alright. You definitely do get a lovely design PSU with plenty and proper length cabling all dark including all dark connectors. The cabling itself I am not a fan off from an aesthetic point of view. It looks a bit cluttered and can easily seem like a dark spaghetti swarm of cabling inside the PSU killing the cool looks. For the enthusiast motherboards that have it, you may also connect two ATX12V connectors which will help you out with some more extreme overclocking. Cooler Master offers a seven year warranty on the product. With that 80+ Titanium certification, its features and looks we feel that they have a nice PSU at hand. I am struggling a little with the low power consumption efficiency as reported by other media, but also feel that if you purchase a 1200W power supply, you are not purchasing it to run a 40 Watt PC. This is a power supply for X99 / Core i7 and at least two enthusiast class graphics cards, I feel those would be the guys and girls that buy this, and for them the low power efficiency remark simply does not apply (while it remains to be an objective observation). So yes my fellow gurus, a 1200W PSU anno 2016 might serve only a small crowd, however keep in mind that at 50% a PSU is the most efficient. With a proper PC and a SLI / Crossfire setup you'll quickly be hovering at precisely that load level. Overall the MasterWatt Maker is definitely approved by us, I am just not sure who's going to spend 449 USD / 399 EURO on a power supply these days?
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