Seasonic's Engineering and Factory Tour

The Second Factory

Seasonic's second factory just down the road is a lot newer, and larger. From the picture below you can see there's still plenty of space for more production lines and expansion.




Be thankful to these ladies the next time you buy a PSU with flat, black cables. Working out which wire is which is far more time consuming and the connectors are harder to insert than standard cables (check her strapped fingers)!

Rounding Up

Seasonic didn’t even care for us to write something – we were taken to Taiwan and China to meet its people and basically prove a point (OK Walter, you won): that as a company while the aesthetics and usability of (modular) connectors might not be its strongest point, if we questioned the quality of what’s in the tin we'd better have a watertight point to make.

With what it claims as a 0.8 percent RMA rate, Seasonic has undoubtedly impressed us and proved at least that if you buy it, short of mishandling between China and your doorstep, we can't see any reason why it shouldn't work.

That doesn’t make every product out of the Taipei offices a 10/10 Gold seal though: Seasonic admitted that while it makes retail products to a set industry standard, few people in its office knew how to build their own PCs, and if they did, seldom partook in it regularly enough to keep up with our progressive industry. Being an engineer to understand and build the innards is one thing, but making a retail product to suit ergonomics, aesthetic tastes and the diversity of markets is quite another.

Since it does very little new with the packaging it’s unlikely to have any unique incompatibility with new chassis, so that's a good thing - Seasonic has found a formula that works and stuck to it, which is hardly a crime.

Seasonic also stated that as long as it conforms to industry standard plugs and the ground rules of solid power delivery, this approach should be fine, but with its latest X-Series PSUs it is changing the game a bit: it's going fully modular. Why? Because it believes in the quality of product and reckons people will not to upgrade the core PSU, instead just changing the cables when new plugs are required.

This way if new graphics cards or motherboards need new plugs, Seasonic can (in theory) just provide them alone because everything is going towards 12V only use: something that Doug Dobson, CTO at PC Power & Cooling, has already echoed to us in the past.

Seasonic also claims this to make it greener than every other PSU company: instead of pandering to a typically "disposable" tech industry mantra, by investing in a core PSU for longer and only changing the cables it means less waste. I do like this noble idea, however, if products like netbooks have shown us anything, people are less inclined to spend more money on a single lasting product because the act of upgrading and buying a shiny new thing is infectious. Unless Seasonic can guarantee future compatibility we're not sure how many people will bite for this selling angle.

As now like I was during the visit, I’m struggling to find criticism and I’ve been back to this a half dozen times already (Urgh!). I think it's worth reiterating that our reviews won’t change – we’ll check everything as ever on our own – but I have to admit there’s a great level of appreciation for the OCD like quality control process that gets a solid, working product to us, first time around.