550W-650W PSU Roundup 2014

Conclusion

If there is one conclusion you should draw from this test, it's that you need to budget £60 to £80 for your PSU if you're building a powerful rig with a single high-end or twin mid-range GPUs. Trying to save a few tenners by going down the Codegen path will cost you a lot more in the long run – first in energy bills and after a while almost certainly in fried computer parts as your PSU crashes, burns and begs you to pull the plug.



So, now you are fully aware of that important nugget of information, which is the one to get? The best of the bunch, by some margin, is the Super Flower Leadex Gold 650W. It costs a pretty penny, but it has plenty to show for it, and if you are going to demand the most and then some from your system, it’s definitely worth the premium over the somewhat cheaper options and its award is well-deserved. Seasonic's M12II Evo Bronze 620W is also worthy of mention since it offers 620W as well as good performance and features for £15 less than the Super Flower, but beware that it is currently hard to find and also very noisy under high load.



If you are not planning to seriously overclock an LGA2011 Core i7 CPU and GTX 780 Ti, for example, you can probably skimp a little and choose either Cooler Master’s V Semi-Modular Series 550W or Corsair’s CS-M Series 550W. The former performs slightly better in general and has vastly superior efficiency at low loads, but is also clearly more expensive. However, it also comes with the certainty of 100 percent Japanese capacitors, whilst Corsair makes do with Chinese ones – Corsair claims the quality is indistinguishable and our tests certainly show no significant difference. We therefore leave that choice up to you, but Corsair certainly has an attractively affordable proposition.

Lastly, if you are really skint and need to get a replacement PSU at short notice and as cheaply as possible, the XFX Pro Series 550W Core Edition is not a bad choice. It was great in its heyday, but times have moved on and you should too. However, at less than 45 quid it is inarguably good value for money.