PC Power and Cooling 510W Deluxe Power Supply

Company: PC Power and Cooling
Product: 510 ATX Deluxe
Street Price: $230 USD
Date Reviewed: September 28, 2003
Reviewed By: Joey Chao

Examining The Turbo Cool 510 ATX Deluxe Interior:

Taking a look at the inside of this power supply gives more insight on why it costs so much and performs so well. You can see that the 510 Deluxe uses a massive heatsink, heavy duty capacitors, a heavy duty transformer, and many other high end components. All of these aid in providing better power, cooler operation, and extended lifetime. If you were to open up some of the other "500W" power supplies, you'll notice that they do not use as high a quality of parts and they also weigh much less. Perhaps, you have read articles about choosing power supplies and the author talks about the weight being a decent judge of how well the PSU in constructed. We agree that weight isn't the best way to determine if a power supply is good but it can give you an idea of what kinds of materials are inside.

The other feature, the one the overclockers like most, are the adjustable potentiometers. These allow for the individual tweaking of the 5V, 12V, and 3.3V lines. Generally speaking, PC P&C do not have low rails but some motherboards have bad power regulators and do not supply the proper voltages to the rest of the system. Low rails can result in system instability at stock speeds and the issue becomes worse when trying to overclock a system. So it is easy to see why this can be such an important feature.

The retail version has the pots inside of the PSU and there are also wholes cut into the top of the casing to allow for easier adjustments. Our review unit has external potentiometers though, which can be custom ordered from PC Power and Cooling at an extra cost. These pots are not extremely sensitive so that you will not accidentally over-volt any of the rails, but you do not have to turn them a lot to get the rails to move either. These external pots are great for adjusting voltages on the fly, especially in extreme applications.