PC Power & Cooling Turbo Cool 860W: Special AnandTech Edition
by Christoph Katzer on February 4, 2008 2:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
Introduction
A short while ago, PC Power & Cooling (PCP&C) revealed its latest addition to their portfolio: the Turbo Cool 860W. It does not use the same topology as the 1000W and 1200W power supplies from the same series, which we will see later when we open the unit up. Today we will be looking at a special unit we received from PCP&C. The company was nice enough to build a special edition PSU that includes extra cable harnesses and connectors - all according to our specifications. Our unit is ready for Triple-SLI with six 6-pin PEG connectors, three of which also perform double duty as 8-pin PEG connectors. On top of that, we asked for 15 SATA connectors to power up some special tests we will be working on this year.
We met PCP&C founder Doug Dodson at this year's CES in Las Vegas; we had the chance to conduct an interview with him that we will publish soon as well. With the 860W version of the Turbo Cool series, PCP&C again targets the higher-end enthusiast market with the need for long lasting industrial standard power supplies. One special feature is the three small potentiometers that allow the user to tune the voltage regulation of the 3.3, 5, and 12V rails.
The label shows PCP&C's general approach to power supplies. We see a single 12V rail, which according to Doug is the best solution for power supplies. We are still waiting for our 15 hard-drives to arrive, but we have talked with at least one AnandTech reader that successfully powered up 18 hard-drives with a single-rail Silencer 750W where all multi-rail power supplies failed. The 12V rail provides a total of 64A and consumes up to 768W of power. In fact, the peak power is around 840W solely on the 12V rail, and our unit was able to reach 967W peak power during the tests. The 3.3 and 5V rails are rather small with only 22A and 26A, but that shouldn't be a problem.
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jamstan - Wednesday, July 2, 2008 - link
Sorry, but I can't give any credence to a review of a PSU that was specially built by the manufacturer for the reviewer. How bout buying a PSU from the Egg or walking into Best Buy and getting one, the same PSU we minions would buy, and test that? I can't help but wonder how "hand-picked" the PSU for this review was. This review is worthless.dawurz - Monday, February 11, 2008 - link
"While the fan runs is rated at the same speed as before"nitromullet - Friday, February 8, 2008 - link
Is the 860W a "true" TurboCool PSU with WIN-TACT internals or is it like the the Silencer line with Seasonic internals?Christoph Katzer - Monday, February 11, 2008 - link
Yeah 100%. Not Seasonic.nitromullet - Tuesday, February 12, 2008 - link
Awesome. Thx for the reply.Justin Case - Thursday, February 7, 2008 - link
[quote]We are still waiting for our 15 hard-drives to arrive, but we have talked with at least one AnandTech reader that successfully powered up 18 hard-drives with a single-rail Silencer 750W where all multi-rail power supplies failed.[/quote]Am I missing something here? I've been running a 16-drive RAID from a cheap 500W Fortron PSU for over one year with no issues. The drives don't even draw 200 watts while working and, even if they weren't set to staggered spin-up, probably wouldn't hit more than 400 during boot.
Stick to Zippy, Fortron and PCP&C, and you'll be fine. Nearly everything else is either a rebranded Zippy / FPS or a piece of crap.
nrb - Thursday, February 7, 2008 - link
[quote]As always, PCP&C provides a 7-year warranty for their power supply. We're not sure how that works with the 200,000 MTBF, as even running 24/7 for ten years wouldn't reach half that figure, but that's apparently a testament of their PSU quality.[/quote]This is a disgusting admission: if the writers at Anandtech don't understand how MTBF is calculated, what chance is there for the people who come to Anandtech to get technical information?
(sigh)
The way it is calculated is:
The manufacturer decides what a "normal" lifespan is for the product, and then runs a large number of models for that length of time, and sees how frequently they fail.
So, for example, they might decide that a "normal" lifespan for a power supply is 5 years. If the MTBF is 200,000 hours, that means that if you run 1000 power supplies continuously for 5 years, on average one of them will fail every 200 hours within the first five years. The figure tells you nothing whatever about what the failiure rate is after the first five years (although you can be sure it will be higher) and of course there is also no indication about what the manufacturer thinks is a "normal" lifespan for the product: maybe it's 5 years, maybe it's just 1.
This is naturally spectacularly misleading to the consumer who thinks it means that just one power supply will tyically run for 200,000 hours before failing. Sadly, he is wrong.
JarredWalton - Monday, February 11, 2008 - link
You're right, and I inserted the comment mostly tongue-in-cheek. The reality is that theoretical MTBF is only vaguely interesting. 1 million is better than 500K, and 500K is better than 250K... at least in theory. In practice, there's an element of "luck of the draw" - plus it depends on how the testing is conducted.So start with 1000 power supplies (or hard drives, or some other component). Make sure all of them function -- dead on arrival units don't count towards MTBF! Now start running all of them with a stopwatch and see how long can it takes before a failure occurs. In the case of PCP&C, it appears that out of 1000 units, the first failure occurred after 200 hours.
How many times do they repeat this sort of test? They probably do it once for each new model. Or maybe they run all of the power supplies until they have two failures? Probably not. The main point is that MTBF isn't a super useful figure, unless you're talking about operational MTBF -- which is only available after the fact, when a device has been on the market for a while. I consider the seven year warranty to be a better indication of quality than the MTBF.
Sorry for the confusion.
JEDIYoda - Monday, February 4, 2008 - link
Silence is not an absolute.Now absolute silence we all can agree is silent!
The word Silence means many things to many people.
I for one have PC Power & Cooling PSU`s in all my riggs.
I have no issues with what some would call the noise and others would call a lack of silence.
Over all a very nice review!!
pauldovi - Monday, February 4, 2008 - link
It seems to me that Anandtech is in bed with PC Power and Cooling.Can we get more love for Silverstone. Their OP / DA series are lovely.