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Highly Efficient powerhouse

Corsair is a respected name when it comes to memory and USB drives, but power supplies? The HX620 ships in a strong, colourful carton and the PSU is encased in soft foam and well-protected from damage. A quality pouch has been provided, which houses all the modular cables and an embossed 3D sticker labelled powered by Corsair.

The unit itself has a matte black finish that looks rugged, no smudges here, and even screws don’t leave marks on this finish, so durability is not as issue. The unit is heavy, and through the honeycomb grille at the rear part a PFC unit is visible. The HX620 makes do with a single 120-mm fan installed in a pull configuration meaning this fan should be facing your motherboard when the PSU is installed. The modular cables are long enough to reach all motherboard connectors, and this PSU supports 4x6 pin PCIe connectors, so even cards which require two 6-pin connectors can be SLIed. Each modular SATA connector cable has 4 ports, so a maximum of 8 SATA hard drives are supported. There is support for up to 6 PATA devices too. The HX620 is 80 plus rated, meaning it delivers an efficiency of at least 80 percent under all conditions.

We tried to load up the HX620 with as many devices as we could. A Core 2 Quad QX9650 (3.0 GHz), ASUS 780i motherboard, 4 GB of DDR2 1066 MHz memory, 2x NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTX graphics cards, two 150 GB WD Raptor HDDs and a Sony Blu-Ray writer. This configuration was then benchmarked for a solid three hours during which we had no crashes and no restarts whatsoever. It seems the Corsair can really deliver its rated wattage and for sustained periods of time, and this configuration will simply blow most run-out-of-the-mill power supplies right out of the water. And all the while the HX620 ran cool (measured 42 degrees) and quiet.

Unless you’re looking at quad SLI or 4-way Crossfire or 2x GeForce 9800GX2 / Radeon HD3870 x2, or two of the newer GeForce GTX 280’s you will never need anything more. For a single graphics card this is more PSU than you’ll probably need and its smaller (by 100 watts) sibling the HX520 will do the trick.