Cooler Master Real Power Pro 550W review
Hi guys,
I am back with another power supply review. This time I will be taking a close look at the Cooler Master Real Power Pro 550W PSU.
Cooler Master renewed most of their product range post Computex. A lot of new and revised products were launched. And this seems to be one of them.
Lets have a look at it, shall we?
[BREAK=Specifications]
First let’s run through the specifications and voltage and current ratings of this power supply
Specifications
Type: ATX Form Factor 12V V2.3 / SSI Standard EPS 12V V2.91
Dimension (W / H / D): Standard ATX 150 x 140 x 86 mm
Input Voltage: 90~264V (Auto Range)
Input Current: 8A @ 115 Vac / 4A @ 230 Vac
Input Frequency Range: 47~63 Hz
PFC: Active PFC (0.99)
Power Good Signal: 100~500 ms
Hold Up Time: >17ms
Efficiency: 83%(110W) / 84%(275W) / 81%(550W)
MTBF: >100,000 hrs
Protection: OVP / UVP / OTP / OCP / OLP / OPP / SCP
Output Capacity: 550 Watts Continuous
Max. Output Capacity: 660 Watts
Operation Temperature: 0~40℃
Safety: Nemko / TUV / cUL / CE / BSMI / FCC / CCC / CCC / C-tick / GOST
Fan: 120 mm fan with intelligent speed controller
Certification: nVIDIA SLI / 80 Plus
Connectors:
M/B 24 Pin x 1
CPU 4 Pin x 1
CPU 8 Pin x 1
PCI-E 6 Pin x 2
4 Pin Peripheral x 5
SATA x 6
4 Pin Floppy x 1
Voltage and Current ratings.
As you can see, this power supply is capable of delivering 432W over 12v rails.
Now let’s move onto the power supply itself.
[BREAK=The Real Thing]
The Real Thing
We received the Power supply alone and not the retail package for the testing. You should get regular stuff like power supply cable, screws and small manual with the power supply just like other Cooler Master Power supplies.
On the first look, the unit does look good. It has metallic black finish. The finish is good and it has that quality finish and feel to it. Everything feels solid in hands.
No flex on the body, good quality wires which are completely sleeved give it a better look and feel. Cables are nice and long. No complains there.
As you can see in the picture, power supply comes with single 120mm fan for the cooling.
[BREAK=The Real Thing Contd...]
All the ratings and stated on the sticker on both the sides of the power supply. The UL number E131875 revels it’s OEM which is ACBEL POLYTECH INC which is the same OEM that we saw for the Cooler Master CM 460 unit we reviewed a while back. This power supply is ATX 12V V2.3 / SSI standard EPS12V V2.91. This is latest ATX specification which ups the +5Vsb to 3.5Amps from previous 2Amps to power the extra USB ports. This is also 80+ certified PSU.
On the back side, you get the power button, cable socket and nice red LED indicating the status of the mains power.
The Back side has hexagonal mesh for good ventilation.
No surprises here. Lets move onto the inside of the power supply.
[BREAK=The Exposed Unit]
The Exposed Unit
The inside of this power supply is clean. This reminded me of the Cooler Master iGreen 600W power supply which I had powering one of my computers. I ended up opening that unit, and the look and feel and overall layout is very similar. Even component placement used on this PSU are similar with few noticeable differences.
The layout and design is very clean which should help in cooling. There are no surprises here as well. The design layout is nothing new. There might be small modifications from the previous generation supplies, but I can’t make them out to be honest. The power supply uses Ltec Capacitors which are made in Taiwan.
The build quality again shows here. All wires are clamped. Nothing is moving around or hanging loose.
[BREAK=The Exposed Unit Contd...]
Taking a look at the backside of the PCB reveals few things. The soldering is clean.
The big solder dump that you see are the ground pins. Unlike what we are used to see in cheap power supplies, the +12v rails do seem to be separate at the output stage on this power supply.
Have a look at this. I have marked the area where +12v lines are soldered. You can clearly see 3 distinct sections of 3 rails.
Tracing these wires revels how these rails are distributed.
Rail 1
• 24pin ATX connector
• Two pins of the 8pin EPS connector
• SATA connectors
• 4pin molex connectors
• One of the two PCI express connector
• Floppy connector
Rail 2
• The other two pins of EPS connector.
• ATX 12V connector
Rail 3
• Other PCI Express Connector.
These rails seems to be well distributed which should help minimize line noise.
To cool all these things, this power supply uses a single 120mm fan. This fan is replaceable and not soldered onto the board.
The fan was dead silent throughout our testing. Even at load, it never became too noisy to irritate or distract me. I had to remind myself to notice if there is any noise coming from the unit. This is good for those seeking quiet computing environment.
The Fan speed does change with change in temperature. But as I said, it never becomes noisy.
Lets move onto the test system and equipments and how we tested.
[BREAK=Test Setup & How We Tested]
Test Setup.
We decided to tax this power supply with the most power hungry setup I can get my hands on. Fortunately I had a Phenom and XFX Geforce 8300 Hybrid SLI motherboard ( you will be seeing the review of this board in next 1-2 days as well
) along with GTX 260 and HD4870 with me to really see how this power supply performs.
Here is Test setup
Processor: AMD Phenom x4 9750
Motherboard: XFX Geforce 8300
Ram: 2x 2GB kit of OCZ Platinum DDR2 1000
Graphics Cards: HD4870 and XFX GTX 260
Hard Drives: 2x360 GB Seagate
Fans: 6x 120mm
Optical Drive: 1x Samsung S223
How we tested
I tested this card with both the GPUs. The CPU was clocked to 2.8Ghz. I did not push this motherboard too hard with the Phenom fearing the legendary motherboard blowout because of our dear Phenom. The XFX 260 was taken to its previously known stable clock speed of 700Mhz Core 1200Mhz memory. The HD4870 was also overclocked to 850Mhz core and 1160Mhz memory. All fans were kept at full speed.
We used out old trusty Uni-T multimeter for voltage measurement and Anshuman analong 30Mhz oscilloscope for the ripple voltage measurement.
So lets move to the tests now.
[BREAK=Performance Results]
Performance Results
We tested this power supply with 4 custom tests.
Test 1 : Idle System in Windows Vista.
Here are the results.
As you can see, the voltage rails are very stable. Rock stable with only marginal 10mv ripple voltage on +12v lines. This is absolutely fantastic to see.
Test 2: Prime95
We used Prime95 to load all cores. And here are the results.
Again, the results look very promising. Not much deviation. And ripple voltage was at 10mv level again.
Test 3: 3DMark Vantage
We ram the entire 3Dmark Vantage benchmark suit and took the readings during all tests and noted the voltages during each test. Here are the results.
As you can see from the chart above. The +12v line dropped slightly during the 3D benchmarks but it never went below 12v and neither did it jump too much up and down. The tipple voltage saw minuscule jump to 15mv which I honestly did not expect. This was way better than what I expected.
Test 4: Prime95 + Fur Render Stability test
This should really push system to its max possible load figures. The Fur Render does push the GPU to its limits. And having all 4 cores loaded at the same time should result in peak power draw.
Here are the results.
Amazingly, the results are still similar to what we have seen. The power supply handed it very well.
[BREAK=Final Thoughts]
Final Thoughts
Testing power supplies is tricky business and I am perfectly aware of this fact. I still do not have sufficient equipment to properly load test the power supply and rely mostly on the real world practical approach with CRO and multimeter as test equipments.
What resulted while reviewing this power supply was simply surprising and unexpected. We are used to seeing quality power supplies from Corsair, Enermax, high end Antec models and some good FSP supplies. Though Cooler Master was always popular amongst the people who can’t really afford very expensive Corsair supplies, it never really dominated enthusiast performance market.
And probably this is why I did not expect this power supply to perform as good as it did. I will honestly put my hands up and say I underestimated this power supply.
I have played with lots of PSUs in last 1 year ranging from Corsair HX series to Forton to Tagan and Antec power supplies. And this PSU is right up there in terms of performance and quality of power.
It’s priced at Rs. 4750 + local taxes in Mumbai which comes at around Rs.5000. And to add more sweetness to the deal, Cooler Master is offering this power supply with 5 Years Replacement Warranty.
The prices might vary depending on state and city. But at this price, it makes an attractive purchase. I know Corsair HX620 is 1.3-1.4k more. But that’s your 1300 bucks, and it all counts.
And it handled cards like HD4870 with ease. This makes it a serious contender in the market.
If I was putting my money in to buy a PSU in Rs.5000 budget, then honestly I would not think twice before putting my hard earned money on this power supply.
This will be better investment than say Corsair VX450 and still save you some money that you will otherwise have to spend on HX620. And I have no doubt about this being better than Tagan BZ500 which is in direct competition to this power supply and costs more than this power supply. The only thing that you miss is modular cables. But I would not hesitate to sacrifice on that for the quality of the power you get.
All in all two thumbs up for this power supply. If it comes down in price by say another 500 bucks, it will be THE power supply to get. But even now its great product to buy.
Pros
• Good Built Quality
• Nice Long cables
• Sleeved cables
• Plenty of connectors
• SLI ready
• 80+ Certified
• Great performance
• Low noise levels
• Price performance ratio
• 5 Years Replacement Warranty
Cons
• Not modular
When Pros list is this long, you know it’s a good one
Special thanks to Cooler Master India for providing this product for testing and review.
Shripad signing out for now until the next time.
Please leave the comments and digg this review
Digg This Review Here : Digg - Cooler Master Real Power Pro 550W Review
Hi guys,
I am back with another power supply review. This time I will be taking a close look at the Cooler Master Real Power Pro 550W PSU.
Cooler Master renewed most of their product range post Computex. A lot of new and revised products were launched. And this seems to be one of them.
Lets have a look at it, shall we?
[BREAK=Specifications]
First let’s run through the specifications and voltage and current ratings of this power supply
Specifications
Type: ATX Form Factor 12V V2.3 / SSI Standard EPS 12V V2.91
Dimension (W / H / D): Standard ATX 150 x 140 x 86 mm
Input Voltage: 90~264V (Auto Range)
Input Current: 8A @ 115 Vac / 4A @ 230 Vac
Input Frequency Range: 47~63 Hz
PFC: Active PFC (0.99)
Power Good Signal: 100~500 ms
Hold Up Time: >17ms
Efficiency: 83%(110W) / 84%(275W) / 81%(550W)
MTBF: >100,000 hrs
Protection: OVP / UVP / OTP / OCP / OLP / OPP / SCP
Output Capacity: 550 Watts Continuous
Max. Output Capacity: 660 Watts
Operation Temperature: 0~40℃
Safety: Nemko / TUV / cUL / CE / BSMI / FCC / CCC / CCC / C-tick / GOST
Fan: 120 mm fan with intelligent speed controller
Certification: nVIDIA SLI / 80 Plus
Connectors:
M/B 24 Pin x 1
CPU 4 Pin x 1
CPU 8 Pin x 1
PCI-E 6 Pin x 2
4 Pin Peripheral x 5
SATA x 6
4 Pin Floppy x 1
Voltage and Current ratings.
As you can see, this power supply is capable of delivering 432W over 12v rails.
Now let’s move onto the power supply itself.
[BREAK=The Real Thing]
The Real Thing
We received the Power supply alone and not the retail package for the testing. You should get regular stuff like power supply cable, screws and small manual with the power supply just like other Cooler Master Power supplies.
On the first look, the unit does look good. It has metallic black finish. The finish is good and it has that quality finish and feel to it. Everything feels solid in hands.
No flex on the body, good quality wires which are completely sleeved give it a better look and feel. Cables are nice and long. No complains there.
As you can see in the picture, power supply comes with single 120mm fan for the cooling.
[BREAK=The Real Thing Contd...]
All the ratings and stated on the sticker on both the sides of the power supply. The UL number E131875 revels it’s OEM which is ACBEL POLYTECH INC which is the same OEM that we saw for the Cooler Master CM 460 unit we reviewed a while back. This power supply is ATX 12V V2.3 / SSI standard EPS12V V2.91. This is latest ATX specification which ups the +5Vsb to 3.5Amps from previous 2Amps to power the extra USB ports. This is also 80+ certified PSU.
On the back side, you get the power button, cable socket and nice red LED indicating the status of the mains power.
The Back side has hexagonal mesh for good ventilation.
No surprises here. Lets move onto the inside of the power supply.
[BREAK=The Exposed Unit]
The Exposed Unit
The inside of this power supply is clean. This reminded me of the Cooler Master iGreen 600W power supply which I had powering one of my computers. I ended up opening that unit, and the look and feel and overall layout is very similar. Even component placement used on this PSU are similar with few noticeable differences.
The layout and design is very clean which should help in cooling. There are no surprises here as well. The design layout is nothing new. There might be small modifications from the previous generation supplies, but I can’t make them out to be honest. The power supply uses Ltec Capacitors which are made in Taiwan.
The build quality again shows here. All wires are clamped. Nothing is moving around or hanging loose.
[BREAK=The Exposed Unit Contd...]
Taking a look at the backside of the PCB reveals few things. The soldering is clean.
The big solder dump that you see are the ground pins. Unlike what we are used to see in cheap power supplies, the +12v rails do seem to be separate at the output stage on this power supply.
Have a look at this. I have marked the area where +12v lines are soldered. You can clearly see 3 distinct sections of 3 rails.
Tracing these wires revels how these rails are distributed.
Rail 1
• 24pin ATX connector
• Two pins of the 8pin EPS connector
• SATA connectors
• 4pin molex connectors
• One of the two PCI express connector
• Floppy connector
Rail 2
• The other two pins of EPS connector.
• ATX 12V connector
Rail 3
• Other PCI Express Connector.
These rails seems to be well distributed which should help minimize line noise.
To cool all these things, this power supply uses a single 120mm fan. This fan is replaceable and not soldered onto the board.
The fan was dead silent throughout our testing. Even at load, it never became too noisy to irritate or distract me. I had to remind myself to notice if there is any noise coming from the unit. This is good for those seeking quiet computing environment.
The Fan speed does change with change in temperature. But as I said, it never becomes noisy.
Lets move onto the test system and equipments and how we tested.
[BREAK=Test Setup & How We Tested]
Test Setup.
We decided to tax this power supply with the most power hungry setup I can get my hands on. Fortunately I had a Phenom and XFX Geforce 8300 Hybrid SLI motherboard ( you will be seeing the review of this board in next 1-2 days as well
) along with GTX 260 and HD4870 with me to really see how this power supply performs.Here is Test setup
Processor: AMD Phenom x4 9750
Motherboard: XFX Geforce 8300
Ram: 2x 2GB kit of OCZ Platinum DDR2 1000
Graphics Cards: HD4870 and XFX GTX 260
Hard Drives: 2x360 GB Seagate
Fans: 6x 120mm
Optical Drive: 1x Samsung S223
How we tested
I tested this card with both the GPUs. The CPU was clocked to 2.8Ghz. I did not push this motherboard too hard with the Phenom fearing the legendary motherboard blowout because of our dear Phenom. The XFX 260 was taken to its previously known stable clock speed of 700Mhz Core 1200Mhz memory. The HD4870 was also overclocked to 850Mhz core and 1160Mhz memory. All fans were kept at full speed.
We used out old trusty Uni-T multimeter for voltage measurement and Anshuman analong 30Mhz oscilloscope for the ripple voltage measurement.
So lets move to the tests now.
[BREAK=Performance Results]
Performance Results
We tested this power supply with 4 custom tests.
Test 1 : Idle System in Windows Vista.
Here are the results.
As you can see, the voltage rails are very stable. Rock stable with only marginal 10mv ripple voltage on +12v lines. This is absolutely fantastic to see.
Test 2: Prime95
We used Prime95 to load all cores. And here are the results.
Again, the results look very promising. Not much deviation. And ripple voltage was at 10mv level again.
Test 3: 3DMark Vantage
We ram the entire 3Dmark Vantage benchmark suit and took the readings during all tests and noted the voltages during each test. Here are the results.
As you can see from the chart above. The +12v line dropped slightly during the 3D benchmarks but it never went below 12v and neither did it jump too much up and down. The tipple voltage saw minuscule jump to 15mv which I honestly did not expect. This was way better than what I expected.
Test 4: Prime95 + Fur Render Stability test
This should really push system to its max possible load figures. The Fur Render does push the GPU to its limits. And having all 4 cores loaded at the same time should result in peak power draw.
Here are the results.
Amazingly, the results are still similar to what we have seen. The power supply handed it very well.
[BREAK=Final Thoughts]
Final Thoughts
Testing power supplies is tricky business and I am perfectly aware of this fact. I still do not have sufficient equipment to properly load test the power supply and rely mostly on the real world practical approach with CRO and multimeter as test equipments.
What resulted while reviewing this power supply was simply surprising and unexpected. We are used to seeing quality power supplies from Corsair, Enermax, high end Antec models and some good FSP supplies. Though Cooler Master was always popular amongst the people who can’t really afford very expensive Corsair supplies, it never really dominated enthusiast performance market.
And probably this is why I did not expect this power supply to perform as good as it did. I will honestly put my hands up and say I underestimated this power supply.
I have played with lots of PSUs in last 1 year ranging from Corsair HX series to Forton to Tagan and Antec power supplies. And this PSU is right up there in terms of performance and quality of power.
It’s priced at Rs. 4750 + local taxes in Mumbai which comes at around Rs.5000. And to add more sweetness to the deal, Cooler Master is offering this power supply with 5 Years Replacement Warranty.
The prices might vary depending on state and city. But at this price, it makes an attractive purchase. I know Corsair HX620 is 1.3-1.4k more. But that’s your 1300 bucks, and it all counts.
And it handled cards like HD4870 with ease. This makes it a serious contender in the market.
If I was putting my money in to buy a PSU in Rs.5000 budget, then honestly I would not think twice before putting my hard earned money on this power supply.
This will be better investment than say Corsair VX450 and still save you some money that you will otherwise have to spend on HX620. And I have no doubt about this being better than Tagan BZ500 which is in direct competition to this power supply and costs more than this power supply. The only thing that you miss is modular cables. But I would not hesitate to sacrifice on that for the quality of the power you get.
All in all two thumbs up for this power supply. If it comes down in price by say another 500 bucks, it will be THE power supply to get. But even now its great product to buy.
Pros
• Good Built Quality
• Nice Long cables
• Sleeved cables
• Plenty of connectors
• SLI ready
• 80+ Certified
• Great performance
• Low noise levels
• Price performance ratio
• 5 Years Replacement Warranty
Cons
• Not modular
When Pros list is this long, you know it’s a good one
Special thanks to Cooler Master India for providing this product for testing and review.
Shripad signing out for now until the next time.
Please leave the comments and digg this review
Digg This Review Here : Digg - Cooler Master Real Power Pro 550W Review
This PSU seems to be really good from this review. If the pricing comes down by arnd 500 or so, i can see many people on budget buying this one. Hope Cooler Master looks into this.
