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So today we are peeking at a revised Galaxy 1 KW PSU. I say revised because internally hardly anything changed (it's difficult to change perfection, right?). But what did change are a handful of things. First and foremost you now have two convertible 6+2p (6/8p) connectors. This means you could hook up two of the new Radeon R600 cards in Crossfire, as such cards have 8-pin connectors. (Psst, if AMD isn't watching I'll show you such connections later on).

The second big change is in fact that the PSU is PCI-Express 2.0 ready. The original PCI-Express bus can't provide enough power for even today's mid-range products. That bus right now will push 75 Watts maximum. For new 2.0 standard future mainboards this spec has been changed and will be double up. In the near future you'll see 225 or 300 Watts flowing over that bus. Geek info: data transfer rate will rise from 2.5 gigabits per second to 5Gbps as well.

Some fascinating info shows us the efficiency of the Galaxy as between 81% and 85%. This is measured at 230V (which we use here in Europe). Notably displayed on the box is that the Enermax Galaxy DXX has an "industrial design" rated to run at 50c 24/7.

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 insufficiencies. 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. So the higher the efficiency the less power loss, the less money you have to pay.

Let's do that math again with the Galaxy, yet this time with a 85% power efficiency in mind. 350/85x100= 412 Watt. So that's saving 88 Watts over a 70% efficient product. So if you have your PC on a lot , think about this theory and what it can save you in the long term.

So next to being a really capable and efficient PSU, what does this PSU have to offer as well ?

Features:

• Smart fan function  - The Smart Fan technology was developed by the folks at Enermax to protect your investment. After your system shutdown, the two ball bearing fans continue to run for another 2 mins to cool off your power supply and components . It also has a heat sensor that will allow the fans to run for more than 2 mins if the temp is greater then 40c after the 2 mins. This will greatly increase the life your power supply and components.
• Five +12V Rails - Independent 12V rails supply to MB/CPU and drives in order to provide stable and clean current to noise-sensitive devices, such as: CPU, add-on cards.Meets UL 240VA safety requirements. It also separates the motherboard rails and video card rails to ensure maximum power to your PCI Express video card.
• High efficiency (85%) - High efficiency is achieved by using high quality components and the skills of our designer to maximize your power supply output and minimize wasted power. Efficiency is the measure of how much of the 100% power going in to the PSU is being used up and the unused power dissipate into heat through the heatsink. Lower efficiency means that more power is being wasted and also the PSU will generate more heat.
• Quad GPU support - Five individual +12V Rails allows the power to support up to 4 PCI E graphic cards.
• Power Guard - The PowerGuard uses a LED light and an internal buzzer to indicate current power supply status. Under abnormal situations, the Power Guard will turn off the power supply to protect your system.
   

As you can see, some key features are advanced security. If anything happens, then the PSU is intelligent enough to shut down fast. Let me show you what happens/ what's needed to have the Enermax Galaxy shut down to protect itself and your expensive gear on each voltage rail.

We tested the audible power guard by simply disconnecting the ATX mainboard cable so we could see what would happen. An immediate PSU shutdown was initiated after which the PSU started beeping in bursts of two audible beeps. Pretty much stating that there was an unusual system shutdown. With the click on the backside button (we'll show you in a minute), the alarm stops. Overall, very impressive features.

I'll trust Enermax with the rest of the electrical circuit protections as our test system is roughly worth 2 grand.

Here is the voltage distribution per rail displayed, courtesy of a Enermax table where we lost both the 850 Watt and 1000 Watt models, mind you that we are testing model EGX1000EWL.

As you can see that's a pile of power.

For us Guru's, most important obviously are the are five 12 volts rails, I mean it's fantastic that there are multiple of them; if you decide to do some SLI/Crossfire gaming you are good to go. There's even a dedicated 12 volts rail for your dual-core processor if you choose to do so. Anyway, add up the 12 volts rails and you'll notice that you'll have 75 AMPs (combined) at your disposal.

Four 12V rails are really intended for your SLI/Crossfire compatibility and thus graphics cards, and one 12V rail for later systems with (dual) dual core (QUAD) CPUs.