Cables and Connectors

As mentioned before, the R90 has cable sleeving like Enermax. Both PCIe connectors are bright blue, making them easy to spot. The fan grille sits flush with the rest of the casing, and in general the design looks decent. We'd prefer plain black cable sleeving, but there's nothing horribly wrong with the current setup.

Cables and Connectors
Fixed Main 24-pin 45cm
ATX12V/EPS12V 4+4-pin 45cm
PCIe 6-pin + 6/8-pin 45-60cm
Peripheral 3x SATA + 1x PATA 45-90cm
3x PATA  + 1x SATA 45-90cm

Considering this is only a 300W PSU, it's not too surprising that some of the cables are a bit short. The main 24-pin connector should be long enough for most cases, but the 4+4-pin one could use a bit more length, especially if you try to use this in a case with a bottom-mounted PSU. The two PEG connectors are nice, even if they are both on one cable. In addition there are two peripheral cables with four SATA and four Molex connectors. Some users might miss the FDD connector, and considering the price it would be nice to at least get an adapter in the package, but thankfully we're mostly done with floppy drives these days.

Appearance and Specifications Internals and Components
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  • Taft12 - Sunday, March 6, 2011 - link

    ... in other words, it's plenty powerful enough for at least 98% of the world's PCs. Time for certain AT trolls to reconsider their definition of worthless.
  • mindless1 - Saturday, March 12, 2011 - link

    but many of us aren't energy tards. I don't care if my PSU gets 75% or 80% efficiency, but I do care that it isn't running near 80% of total capacity. Further, PSU reviewers have it wrong, they test as if a 500W PSU is bad if it only does 400W stable, not recognizing that running a 400W capable PSU at 200W is more desirable to many than running a 300W capable PSU at 200W output.

    The wattage rating is not like a "match this to your system power usage rating", it's a MAXIMUM you are always better off to stay far far under. It is easy to overlook this in reviews because it is impossible to test for the viable lifetime of a system and by that I don't mean lifetime till the next generation of parts come along, I mean what is the first failure point and so on until repair costs more than the value of the system to its present owner, not to an enthusiast that would spend hundreds on upgrades every year or two regardless of failures.

    The average computer owner with a system under 5 years old just wants it to keep working as cheaply as possible. Soon that figure will rise to 10 years, given more than double the memory and # of CPU cores installed in the average new system to mostly do the same old tasks. Plus twitter 400 bytes of text at a time.
  • JasperJanssen - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link

    Except it really isn't remotely that simple, and if you have a system that consumes 200W max, then it will probably idle under 50 watts, and the 800 Watt power supply (which is decently efficient at 200 Watts, as that's within the powerband 80Plus optimises for), will be ridiculously inefficient at 50, especially compared to a 300W powersupply where 50W is close to the optimised powerband.

    And if you're thinking you don't care about efficiency.. let me ask you *why* think running a power supply under the rated wattage is a good thing. The only thing I can think of that leads to your purported better endurance is less heat in the power supply, if you're not running at max.

    That, too, is no longer as simple as that. A less efficient power supply (like one running way under its rating) will be less efficient at idle loads and thus generate more heat. Its cooling system is never full-on at these low temperatures. It's entirely possible for an 850 watt power supply to be hotter, and last less long, than a 300 watt power supply, when they are both driving the same 50 to 200 watt system.
  • MainThink - Saturday, March 5, 2011 - link

    What's the deal with all the typos?

    I'm never overly picky, but after the fifth one in two pages I begin to wonder how difficult really is to find two minutes and read the article again before publishing it.
  • JarredWalton - Saturday, March 5, 2011 - link

    My apologies... Martin isn't a native English speaker, so he writes his review and then I go through and try to correct the grammar and/or spelling errors. Since I did the editing/corrections in our CMS rather than Word, spellcheck isn't readily available. I've made another pass and tried to catch any remaining typos, but if you want to point out other errors I'll be happy to correct them.

    When you're reading/typing/editing, unless you're being very methodical words like "acheivement" and "achievement" read the same. It's like the email that went around a few years ago:

    ------------------
    Mipellssed Wdors

    Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?
    ------------------
  • XZerg - Saturday, March 5, 2011 - link

    The mipellssed Wdros

    My take on that is that our brain looks for patterns rather than just reading first and the last word - Mipellssed - the "M", "pe", "ll", "ed", "ss" all sort of trigger our brain to recall words that are similar and replace the misspelled version - it just so happens so fast that we think our brain reads it like so but that's not the case.
  • bobbozzo - Monday, March 7, 2011 - link

    Hi Jarred, even if you're using your CMS, FireFox can do spell checking. Are you using IE instead?

    I already posted about it, but in Page 1 Paragraph 2, 'Season' should be 'Seasonic'.

    Thanks
  • JarredWalton - Monday, March 7, 2011 - link

    The CMS has spell checking, but you have to manually select it and it's sort of half-baked. You don't get underlined words as you type, and Firefox's built-in spell checking doesn't work because it's not just a textbox... some sort of rich text editing box with images and such (not sure if it's Java or what). Anyway, I switched to the source HTML view (which is a regular text box), but Season is spelled correctly so I still missed that one. I'll go edit it again. :-)
  • MainThink - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    I realize reading my comment again that I must have had a bad day 'cause I sound like an *sshole in it.

    I'm sorry for that and I appreciate your reply.
    English is not my first language either but mistakes like 'acheivement' as you mention or the classic 'recieve' jump at me like mad cats LOL

    Anyway, thanks again and please forgive my moment of bad attitude.
  • dvijaydev46 - Saturday, March 5, 2011 - link

    I always look at Huntkey with caution as it once reportedly tried to bribe Hardware Secrets to make a favorable review. I hope huntkey produces good PSUs hereafter rather than trying to fool people.

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