Fancy a new modular power supply that has secure connectors that won’t get knocked out, has enough PCIe connectors for a pair of GTX295s or four 4850s and looks good to boot. Then this Kingwin Mach 1 900W might just suit your needs.

Power Supplies are important parts of our computers but were once the unappreciated forgotten component. These days however this is no longer the case, just take a look at the range of supplies with gloss finishes and go faster stripes not to mention all the LED fans etc. It seems that gone are the days of getting your power supply as part of your case and equally gone are the days of grey unfinished stainless steel.

Well here we have a 900W power supply from Kingwin which offers blue LEDs surrounding the modular connections and a blue LED fan all encased in a semi-gloss dark grey casing. It certainly fits in with the current crop of bling bling power supplies having similar locking modular connectors to the Tagan Piperock range and the original Hiper Type-R.

Who are Kingwin then? Certainly not a familiar name to those of us in the UK and indeed you may have to shop around a bit to find a reseller who stocks Kingwin. They were founded in 1992, which is actually quite a while ago now (17 yrs) and have their headquarters in the US. There is of course the obligatory (for PC component manufacturers) site in China too.

Box Contents
The overall impression of the Mach 1 box is fairly understated considering its outgoing look when installed and running. Using a black background there are pictures of the Mach 1 power supply and then additional details and features including all the compliances. The box is generic for the whole range and actually shows a power supply from further down the range in the pictures. The picture only shows 6 modular outputs where as this 900W version has 8 outputs.

The power supply and accessories are well packed into the box without being overly extravagant. Foam inserts protect the main unit and a hard plastic case contains the cables. There’s a handle on the top to aid getting the box home from the shop but I would be surprised if anyone could find a place that sells this that isn’t delivery only, certainly not in the UK.

In the box you’ll find the main unit, a full set of modular cables, a power cable for your region, a manual and a small plastic bag containing some thumb screws for fitting the power supply. The manual is surprisingly informative giving all sorts of details about the connector pin-outs, the expected tolerances and the limits of the various outputs.

The finish on the outer casing of the power supply is good and should suit most case styles. The blue LED fan is made from clear plastic which means that while the power supply is out of the case and turned off you can get a good look at the internals without even opening up the case. The first thing that’s apparent when you do this is that there are two pretty hefty aluminium heatsinks for dissipating all the heat given out by a 900W power supply when running at high load. This is definitely a good thing and hopefully will help keep it running cool and for many years.

As you can see from the pictures, the fan included is a large bottom mounted fan as is becoming standard in modern power supplies, rather than the usual 80mm fan on the rear of a traditional power supply. This particular fan is 150mm in size and as mentioned has clear blades and blue LEDs, it is also automatically controlled by the power supply electronics with respect to fan speed so that it spins faster and cools more when required but slows down to offer quiet operation whenever possible.

Installation
Installation of the unit into the PC case follows the same procedure as any other power supply really. It’s just a case of placing it into the case and securing it with the four screws provided. The screws provided are thumb screws so you won’t even need a screwdriver. I found that I needed to keep the screws loose until I’d got them all in so that I could give the power supply a little adjustment to get all the screws in.

With the power supply happily fitted to the case it’s just a matter of making the connections. The 20+4 pin connector is hard wired into the supply and this is pretty much expected after all no PCs can run without it. The only reason I can see for not using the 20/24pin connector is if you have a separate second power supply for powering your graphics cards but this would be rare and very much a custom job. Oddly this power supply like so many others too, has both the 4pin and 8pin 12V connection hard wired into the supply. I would like to see these as a modular cable being as there are two options, as it stands you find yourself needing to find space to hide away the one that your no needing. So if you have a fully windowed case like my uATX LAN cube, you might want to avoid this power supply.

There are a total of eight sockets on the power supply to connect the modular cables too. Four of them have four pins and the other four have five pins. The four pin sockets are for connecting the PCIe cables to and you get four PCIe cables for this purpose. Two of the PCIe cables are plain 6pin and the other two are 6+2pin to allow you to either use them in 8pin sockets or in 6pin sockets. This should offer sufficient PCIe power for all but the extreme graphics user who wants quad sli/crossfire with four very high end cards.

The remaining five pin connectors are for anything else. To plug in here you get two cables each with four SATA connectors, a cable with four molex connectors and a cable with four molex and one floppy connector. With all these connectors you really should be able to connect everything up, there’s plenty of SATA connectors (8) for those of us who have left molex behind. Then for those who haven’t yet moved to SATA, there’s plenty of molex connectors (8) too, these are also commonly required for fan controllers and case lights as well as legacy drives so they remain an important connector to have. Then if you insist on still having a floppy drive, you too are catered for with a single floppy connector. Although that’s a little cruel on the floppy connector as it is also useful for other purposes such as IDE to SD card adapters.

All of the modular cables are well braided to help you maintain a tidy PC inside, which of course aids cooling too. However I was disappointed that the selection of cables means that you may end up with unused connectors hanging about in your PC. For instance if you want to add a single molex powered device, such as an older but still perfectly good DVD drive, you will have to use a cable with 3 additional molex connectors that won’t be needed. You’ve then got the task of hiding those additional connectors and length of cable away somewhere in your case which partly defeats the object of going for a modular power supply in the first place. My old Hiper Type-R power supply had cables with single connectors on them for such a purpose but then you could add additional connectors via add on cables if and when you needed them.

Performance
It is difficult to measure the performance of a power supply without specialist equipment and a lot of spare time, neither of which are available for this review. However I can tell you that fitting this power supply made no difference to the stability of the current overclock on my E2160 CPU which runs at 3.3GHz with a significantly raise voltage.

Under load the read backs from my motherboard remain very stable with no significant fluctuations in any voltage. The 12V flicks between 12.15V at idle and 12.10V at load and the 5V drops from 5.09V to 5.06V for a short moment at load before returning to 5.09V and remaining stable. The 3.3V stays at a constant 3.25V and my CPU voltage fluctuates slightly between 1.51V and 1.52V although this is probably more likely due to the motherboard’s power circuitry as it’s not a voltage that is directly output by the power supply.

All this looks good but then I’m not exactly pushing the limits of this power supply by any stretch of the imagination. The system that is running from it has a single ATI 4870 graphics card, an overclocked E2160 CPU on an ASUS P5E3 Deluxe motherboard, 2 x 2GB of OCZ Reaper DDR3 Ram, a single SATA DVD-RW drive and a Samsung 250Gb SATA HDD. When I get the chance and funds I will be adding another graphics card for crossfire and a quad core CPU but it should still be well under the 900W limit.

In my opinion the real test of a power supply is its longevity. Will it continue to supply the stable power that it is currently doing consistently over many years? This cannot be proven or dis proven in a review like this. Lengthy extended warranties like the 5 years that Corsair are offering suggest that their power supplies will stand the test of time but you can’t assume just because a 5 year warranty isn’t offered then the power supply won’t last. This power supply doesn’t come with an extended warranty – you just get the standard 1 year. It does provide piece of mind to have the longer warranty though, which would be nice.

Conclusion
Certainly the Kingwin Mach 1 does what it says that it would as far as I am able to prove. I was disappointed by the ‘no so modular’ nature of the modular cables/connectors however. Of course it would be nice to have a longer warranty but then you can’t get a modular 900W power supply from Corsair for under £100, you’d be looking at the 620W from them at the moment for under £100.

I do like the way the modular cables connect, I liked that style with the Hiper type-R that I had before and the blue LED fan and blue LEDs around the modular connections look stylish in a suitably blue themed case.

UPDATE (24 April 2010) This power supply has now failed completely and has been send back under warranty. Please read my full failure report

Pros Good Styling 900W for low cost Appears to supply good stable power Great secure modular connectors Quiet with fan control Has all the PCIe connections (6 and 8 pin) you could need Cons Short warranty offered From a lesser known company with less of a track record Cables could be made more modular Lacking 80+ efficiency rating FAILED completely within its first year!

Overall Score: 5/10

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