Final Words & Conclusion
Final Words & Conclusion
The market for power supplies is horrendously saturated, for every 10 USD/EURO increment you will be able to spot a PSU that meets your requirements and budget. Things a manufacturer needs to do is going a bit more extreme in design, efficiency and features. With the XTREME GAMING XP1200M, Gigabyte certainly manages to impress. This fully modular design PSU will prevent any wire spaghetti clutter in your system and next to that the cabling is done tastefully as well. We are however not really sure if there is a significant enough market left for KW (and higher) PSUs ? The trend is more energy efficiency and power consumption. Next to that Crossfire and SLI setups are in decline, even Nvidia is not supporting 3 and 4-way SLI officially anymore. But if you like to tweak and overclock with a multi-GPU setup, then a 1200W PSu certainly makes sense, and here is why. At 50% load your power supply is the most efficient. Hence I always recommend people to calculate their power budget and double it up. So if your mobo eats 25 Watts, your processor 100 Watts, your two cards in multi-GPU eat 2x 225 Watt and you add say 25 Watts for storage devices ... you are already in that range especially of you overclock a little. The XTREME GAMING XP1200M PSU is designed for the true aficionado that overclock to the extreme or the ones that build PCs with multiple GPUs. Realistically yes, that is a limited market. That said however, it does not disqualify how good this power supply really is.
Equilibrium
So again, any PSU at half the maximum load is where it'll be the most efficient and in this case at 230V that is 92%~94%. As such the 500~600 Watt range is a bit of a sweet-spot. While passing 700 Watt load we do can confirm that the power efficiency remains excellent as it performed smack down where it needs to be with other Platinum tested models. At a price of 279 USD / 249 EUR the product is not cheap though. But compared to the competition it is affordable, but for any PSU that is a lot of money to spend. You do get what you pay for, high efficiency levels, great looks, great connectivity and of 5 years warranty as well.
Stability
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, it has just so much power to handle multiple heavy duty graphics cards. I mean 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.
Aesthetics
Aesthetics then, we do find the design to be a bit Orange? Being Dutch, I like it as it is the nation color. But Orange might be hard to use in a dark colors chassis combined with other colors present on components like the motherboard and graphics card. The cables and connector are all black and or flat for most of them. Good to see is that the connectors themselves are all black as well. The added benefit obviously is very clean looking wiring for that ultimate finish. 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 XTREME GAMING XP1200M delivers on all fronts. It's not cheap at an MSRP of 279 USD though. But you do get a lovely design PSU with plenty of proper length cabling all dark including all dark connectors. And there's plenty of connectors available as well. If you combine that with a fully modular design in mind then Gigabyte certainly has a proper Platinum certified PSU at hand. The XTREME GAMING XP1200M we feel is a winner. Next to the efficiency it as good looks, is modular, is very stable, comes with dark cabling and then we have to acknowledge it's reasonably silent (yet not 100%) as well. Our tests show that the PSU positions itself where it needs to be at Platinum level. I favor modular cables on power supplies as you get to use the cables that you need. So there's no 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. Gigabyte offers a five year warranty on the product, though we like 7 years better, it's hard to go wrong with this product. With that 80+ Platinum certification, its features and looks we feel that Gigabyte has an excellent PSU in their hands. A 1200W anno 2016 might serve only a small crowd, however keep in mind that at 50% a PSU is the most efficient. Overall this XTREME GAMING XP1200M PSU is definitely Guru3D approved, a very impressive product.
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