For those of you who don’t already know, I’ve been having some power problems lately. I had a 600 Watt Enermax PSU in my system that failed. Upon reflection, I’d guess the poor PSU was overloaded – I have a Q6600 CPU, D975XBX2 board, and GeForce 8800GTX-OC, as well as four 500GB Seagate drives. When the Enermax PSU failed I needed a replacement. The heftiest PSU I could find in Klamath Falls was a 500 Watt Antec SmartPower 2.0. The Antec managed to run my system just fine until I launched a 3D game, then the system powered off or locked up. I solved the problem temporarily by using a spare 300W Enlight PSU to run my hard disks and optical drives. With the two supplies in tandem my computer was stable again – albeit louder due to the open case to allow both supplies.
A good friend, Ashley, recommended I check out BFG’s ES-800 PSU. It looks pretty nifty, using some new switching technology which changes frequency dynamically with load. Unfortunately I needed a PSU quickly, and the ES-800 is really hard to find right now. As of today it’s still sold out on their website.
Failing to get the ES-800, I decided to shop around for a new PSU the conventional way. Off to NewEgg, ZipZoomFly, etc. I discovered SeaSonic has a 700 Watt model which looked very nice. When Ashley’s site was more active we had quite a few power supply reviews, and I heard personally from the reviewers about how stable and reliable the SeaSonic supplies are. I took the plunge and paid easily a $40 premium to get the SeaSonic. It arrived yesterday and is now powering my system as I write this.
The SeaSonic M12-700 has the typical features of modern supplies – thermally controlled fans for quiet operation, modular connectors to reduce clutter, 3 year warranty, case sticker, quad 12V rails, etc. What impressed me most was the variety of auxilliary power connectors supplied. Three SATA power cables were provided, one with four connectors and two with two connectors. This is great for me, I only need to run a single cable down to my hard disks, and a single cable up to my optical drives. Previously I’ve had to run at least two cables down to the hard disks and that just creates extra clutter.
That being said, the lack of variety in auxiliary power cables disappointed me as well. After being impressed by the SATA connector cables I expected to see the same for all of them. Unfortunately the PCIe 12V connectors came in two styles – one cable with one connector, and two cables with two connectors. The PSU has two connectors for the PCIe 12V cables. For anyone running a single GPU requiring a single PCIe power connector, or two GPUs requiring two connectors each, this configuration would be fine. But for people like me who need two PCIe connectors for a single card there is a cable missing. Two cables with one connector each should have been supplied to facilitate connecting two 12V rails to the single card without leaving two extra PCIe connectors dangling.
I can’t fault SeaSonic too much – I’ll just leave two PCIe connectors dangling. As soon as nVidia decides SLI on Intel motherboards is a valid market segment I’ll have a use for them, but who knows how long that will take.
Overall I’m happy with the SeaSonic M12. It runs cool compared to the Antec and Enermax PSUs I had previously and is definitely quiet. It’s been two weeks now running my system and so far no issues have arisen. I think it’s safe to say I would recommend this PSU if you’re shopping for a few more amps to drive those power-hungry GPUs.
