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Enermax Galaxy 1000W DXX (EGX1000EWL)Dual 300W graphics cards? Bring them on!
Info: EnermaxUSA
All rise please. The mother of all PSUs had an extreme makeover; and has arrived. Hey everyone, and welcome to yet another Enermax Galaxy 1000 Watts PSU review. Huh ? Didn't you already write one of these, you ask? Yeah true. But see, it got an update as something remarkable is happening in the land of graphics cards, and the PSU industry needs to react to it. See, these lovely fragmeisters graphics cards are becoming the number one item in your PC, consuming an absolutely tremendous amount of power while you are playing games.
Therefore, this year you'll start seeing something new on PCs: An 8-pin power connector. Crazy you say? Well, what if I told you that an unnamed graphics card has both a 6-pin and 8-pin [convertible 6+2p (6/8p)] power connector. See, the PCI-Express bus can deliver 75 Watts. A 6-pin power connector; again 75 Watts. The new 8-pin connector: 150 Watts. Do the math. 300 Watts per graphics card is slowly becoming accepted in the market. And we haven't even mentioned Crossfire or SLI here.
Crazy? Yes ... But it's the reality and luckily for the high-end freaks, there are power supplies that can manage that power draw extremely well. The Enermax Galaxy 1000 Watt PSU is such a device, and now it is updated towards version DXX (EGX1000EWL), and it's all about the pins, man.
Quad-core, Dual Core CPUs, two Dual Core CPU's per mainboard dual graphics cards connected to your dual monitors, the sky is the limit. 1000 Watts PSU's do not sound that crazy anymore as they did two years ago. Agreed, a Kilowatt PSU right now is still overkill. For any given über high-end system, a 700 Watt PSU would be sufficient, true. But the new PSUs while being overkill and expensive, do last years. With that in mind think about future development a little. We already heard about 8-core CPUs, we know they are coming. We've seen the rumors of future graphics cards consuming 250-275 Watt so what about two of them in Crossfire or SLI setup ?
With that in mind, let me ask you a question: What's keeping all these components running and stable ? Yes of course, your power supply unit.
Now honestly guys and girls, we need to start thinking about mother nature a little as well as our power bills ... This really can't be healthy. Luckily, we see a strong movement in the processor industry where we start to see performance to watt ratio's. Power consumption is getting more and more awareness. This has also become a trend in the PSU industry. Power efficiency is what it is called and we'll chat about it on the next page.
Aesthetics; a year or three years ago another trend started. We all created a demand for modified PCs. The dull beige painted PCs had to go. We want nicely shaped cooled and preferably lit PCs with side windows so we could actually look at the inside of the PC. Really cool ... but that created another issue. We now had the beautiful looking cases where you could look inside, but that resulted in pulling the hairs out of our heads as there were yellow, red, and black wires coming from the PSU everywhere. It was then that the PSU got another function, aesthetics - it needed to look nice. By organizing them and by giving you the option to actually modify the wires you want to use, another problem was solved.
The two reasons mentioned above, from a consumer point of view, have been by far the most important development for PSUs; namely stable high output quality power distribution for high-end setups and the option for modability, using only the wires that you need. Almost ANY manufacturer has picked up on this trend and it has become a very big market for sure. Today's tested PSU is no less. We see dedicated wiring for the necessities, and for all optional devices we see modular cables.
The PSU we will be testing today is, to this date, one I consider to be also the best built SLI/Crossfire ready PSU money can buy. It's quad everything ready. It's elegant to look at, can do cable management, and will provide you with everything you need to create a stable environment for the über-rig of yours. The connectors are nicely wrapped in a foil, and as explained most of them are detachable so you can choose how much wiring you want inside your PC. We call that advanced cable management, it facilitates the installation of your PC and gives you the option to only use the required cables.
This 1000 Watts creature came straight from the Dark Side where it carries the label "Galaxy", and this model comes with a fantastic 1000 Watts rating. Mind you that there are several models. There is also an 850 Watt version of this model, and then the two new DXX versions (which I am testing the 1KW version of today).
It's what is called a high-high-end PSU which is ready for SLI, Crossfire and quad SLI as it has five ... Yeah, you are reading this right; five 12 volts rails rated with 17 AMPs each. Considering that the most modern graphics card to date consumes 10 AMPs per GPU I dare to state that power distribution will not be an issue at all, no Sir.
Let's startup the review and have a good look. In today's test we'll stress the PSU with a very stringent setup that for sure will shake the Galaxy (a little).
