Tuniq Miniplant 950 Watt Power Supply review

Power Efficiency

Judging from the specs the power efficiency of PSU is is nothing to be ashamed about either as it is rated to be a 80+(%) efficient PSU measured at 230V (which we use here in Europe) and at 100% load it's energy efficiency should still be 80%.

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 80% efficiency 350/80x100=438 Watt. We save 62 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.

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.