The green-off

The Antec box, keeping with its name, is coloured in shades of brown with the front picture with the unit sunbathing on some CGI sand dune. Antec have gone for a little bit more conservative, professional feel.

The Earthwatt’s is a bland grey looking unit, much like an OEM PSU rather than a retail product. Normally in a power supply you'll find a large 120mm fan, this dwarfs the Earthwatt’s single rear 80mm fan, with the only eye catching part being the small ‘Antec’ logo on it.

As this PSU isn't the modular type, you'll get a bunch of cables, a little bag of screws, a power lead and an instruction manual.

The Antec has two PCI-e connectors each on their own cable which makes cable management a little bit more difficult. It has 4 SATA plugs on two cables, and 3 molex's on another two with a single FDD connector tacked on the end.

The Earthwatt's is fully compliant with ATX 12v 2.2 standard guaranteeing its functionality with older, current and newer systems. The lack of the latest 8-pin PCI-e connector is a bit of a let down but over this power supply will run most systems. It has the usual 20+4pin ATX plug which will happily run the latest rig or an older P4 setup.

The Antec only sleeves the huge 20+4pin cable with a funky black sleeve with a twist of red and leaves the rest of the wires bare.

The Antec gives you a separate 8pin connector and the standard 4 pin one. This gives you more compatibility with you computer thus far (if you have some out-there motherboard) which is nice to see.

Looking at the back of the Antec you'll find it has a solid back with a 80mm hole cut out providing the fan room to breath. The inside back of the power supply is grilled to allow hot air from your PC case to be flushed out the back. While a 120mm fan would be quieter, the Antec Earthwatt’s does say that the PSU is part of their Quiet Computing product range.

The Antec Earthwatts is RoHS meaning that you won’t be killing your woodland animals when you come to dispose of the PSU.