Kingwin Mach 1 1000w

The Kingwin is nickel plated giving a platinum coloured mirror finish. Fortunately though, fingerprints don’t show up on the power supply, so you don’t have to worry about spoiling the aesthetics of your unit with greasy finger prints.

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At the centre of the PSU is a 150mm translucent blue fan. For aesthetic purposes, there are blue LED’s mounted in it to give it that cool glow. According to Kingwin, this fan is ‘silent’.

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The rear of the Mach 1 features no 80mm fan - this is a relief for all silence enthusiasts as 80mm’s tend to be quite noisy. To help hot air make its exit from the unit there is a honeycomb grill – this ensures maximum air to out the back. To read more about PSU grills, visit the glossary entry here.

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Newer power supplies are now starting to incorporate LED’s into the rear of the unit to show their current state. The Mach 1 doesn’t include a LED, though there is plenty of space for Kingwin where they could have included one. A missed opportunity I feel.

There are two types of modular sockets on the unit: 4 pin and 5 pin. The 4 pin sockets are the four nearest sockets to the ATX cable and are for only PCI-E connectors. The last four sockets are the 5 pin ones; these are for the SATA and Molex connectors.

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These modular sockets are similar to the ones found on Hiper power supplies where you screw the terminal connectors into the modular port. I prefer these to the classic modular sockets as they are much more secure and look much nicer – that’s got to be a bonus.

Altogether there are four PCI-E leads. Two of which are the 6+2 pin type which allow you to use them for both 8 and 6 pin. The other two cables are 6 pin only. These connect to the 4 pin modular sockets on the Power Supply. All these connectors are red in colour and have ‘PCI-E’ written on their connectors.

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The two included SATA cables have four SATA plugs on each cable. This should be plentiful for most people. On average, each of these cables is around one meter in length – so plenty of leeway for some serious cable management.

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In regards to the Molex cables, they are also a similar length. One of the Molex cables features 4x Molex connectors and the other cable features 4x Molex connectors and a floppy connector. It’s nice to se one of these, but someone buying a 1000W PSU probably won’t be using a floppy drive.

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Physically attached to the Mach 1 (not modular) is a 24 pin connector – which can also be used as 20 pin. There is also a 4-pin CPU power connector and an additional 8-pin motherboard connector for newer systems. The latter of these cables feature blue socket connectors whilst the ATX connector is standard black.

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All the cables are braided in high quality cable braiding, which is styled with golden stripes running diagonally. At the socket ends, the cable braiding is heat shrunk to stop the braiding from fraying or coming loose.

Testing

Installation

Installation was very simple. The screw holes on the rear of the Kingwin lines up perfectly with my chassis’ screw holes. The modular cables simply plug into the terminals on the power supply and then are tightened in position by screwing them in their sockets. As the cables are modular and braided, cable management is very simple.

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Methodology

Testing power supplies is a fairly simple process compared to other products. The unit is hooked up to the most powerful hardware we have available at the time, and left in an idle state for 30 minutes. After that time, we use a multimeter plugged into the ATX power connector, and a PF and wattage meter for their results respectively. Then, the PC(s) that the unit is powering are loaded as far as they can go to guarantee maximum power draw, and the results are taken again.

Thanks to XFX, we had some really high end kit to test this unit with.

The test setup used was as follows:

Processor	Intel C2D E6750 @ 3.2ghz
Motherboard	XFX 790i Ultra SLI
RAM	2GB Crucial Ballistix 1600mhz
Graphics Card	2 x 98000GX2 Quad SLI
HDD	Western Digital Caviar SE
OS	XP Pro x86