Tuesday 23 November 2010

Review of the Huntkey X7 900W Power Supply


Huntkey is a Chinese Power Supply Unit manufacturer that was established just under 20 years ago. It manufactures both OEM and retail power supplies.


The Huntkey X7 is a modular power supply that is certified by 80plus Silver.
In the sleek, well-designed packaging you get two users manuals, the power supply itself and all of the modular cables. These cables are:
2x 6pin PCI-e, 3x 6+2 pin PCI-e, 1x 8pin PCI-e, 1x 4+4 pin CPU power, 6 x Serial-ATA, 5 x 4-pin peripheral, 1 x 3+1pin floppy disk.
No screws or cable ties are included which is an unfortunate omission as one of this power supplies features is cable management.



All of the cables are sleeved helping to keep the cables tidy and aiding cable management inside the case. However, the wires are very visible through this sleeving. I would personally have preferred the cables to be opaque as I think this would be more pleasing visually inside the case.

Being modular, only necessary cables are connected cutting down on mess caused by unused cables. This, again, aides cable management inside the case as you only have to deal with the necessary cables. One thing I don’t like is the amount of connections on the Serial-ATA cables. The amount of bends in the cable makes it very difficult to manage efficiently. The cables are of good lengths however, easily reaching all of the components in a full-tower case. The cables would be stretched in a larger case such as the Cooler Master HAF X.
The housing of the power supply itself is nickel-plated brushed silver with a 140mm fan positioned on top. This fan claims to have ‘intelligent-thermal fan control technology’. I have found this smart-fan controller to have been very effective and the fan to be barely audible up to 75% load. However, once over 75% load the power supply starts to become very noisy. The diagram on the back of the power supply that shows where to connect each cable is very helpful; particularly to those who are inexperienced with power supplies.
Sadly, there is no AC switch on the back of the power supply which could be a hindrance in some situations where you need to quickly power off the computer.
The power supply has five 12volt rails each with an 18A capacity, meaning the stable with very little deviation (a maximum of 3%). The X7 claims to be compliant with multiple graphics cards, but I think that it would struggle slightly with 3 or more high-performance cards.
The 80-plus Silver award proves this power supply to be very efficient and this was also the case in my tests. The X7 sapped the same amount of power as a generic 500watt OEM power supply which flabbergasted me.
In conclusion, the X7 seems to have very high build quality and overall excellent cable management features. The included 2 year warranty is also nice. The cable management is slightly let down by the number of connections on each wire. A major flaw I have found is that I cannot seem to be able to find a retailer anywhere in the UK.


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