Rosewill Fortress Platinum 450W
by Martin Kaffei on September 14, 2012 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
- PSUs
- Rosewill
- 80Plus Platinum
- ATNG
- Fortress
- 450W
Rosewill Fortress Platinum 450W
We've recently had a ~40$ PSU roundup, so we felt it might be time for another "expensive" PSU review. The Rosewill Fortress Platinum 450W is an 80 Plus Platinum certified power supply with fixed cables. On the following pages we will see if Rosewill ranks among the best.
Those looking for maximum efficiency can now set their sights on 80 Plus Platinum PSUs, though they are very expensive. Especially the MOSFETs inside create high costs as a low drain-source resistance is difficult to realize. It's still questionable if there is a large market for these products, taking into account the many affordable 80 Plus Bronze/Silver/Gold solutions.
Going from 80 Plus Bronze (82-85% efficiency) to Silver (85-88%) to Gold (87-90%) to Platinum (89-92%) is a case of seriously diminishing returns when you look at pricing. You can find 80 Plus Bronze units for under $50 for 450W (give or take), but the jump to Silver kicks the starting prices north of $80 at Newegg while giving users 700W or more power—certainly not something most users need. Gold brings back some lower power ratings, but Rosewill and Seasonic are the two least expensive offerings at $60, with 450W and 360W respectively. Rounding out the options, Platinum power supplies like the Fortress series currently start at $90 for 450W.
In short, Bronze gets you 95% of the efficiency of Gold for about 2/3 the cost, and 92% of the efficiency of Platinum for about half the price. A typical system that draws around 75W at idle would save 8W going from Bronze to Platinum. At that rate and paying $0.10 per kWh, you save $7 per year when running the PC 24/7. For servers and other PCs that are on 24/7 already and consume a lot more power, efficiency can make a lot of sense (e.g. power savings of around $40 per year for a 500W server using the same $0.10 per kWh), but for home users there needs to be something more than just pure efficiency to make the increased cost worthwhile. Does the Fortress have that something extra, or is it simply a higher cost PSU with an incremental increase in efficiency? Let's find out.
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pattycake0147 - Friday, September 14, 2012 - link
Also not trying to be a jerk. If you're going to talk about how expensive it is on the first page, then tell me the price. I had to search for it and then finally found the price listed on the last page.doctormonroe - Friday, September 14, 2012 - link
In the article it states that the warranty length is 5 years, however according to Rosewill's product page the Fortress-450 has a 7 year warranty.http://www.rosewill.com/products/2286/ProductDetai...
justaviking - Friday, September 14, 2012 - link
Article is not consistent with itself:Page 2 says "7-year warranty"
Page 6 says "5-year warranty"
radbmw - Friday, September 14, 2012 - link
Warranty is 7 years according to Newegg, as well.Uritziel - Friday, September 14, 2012 - link
I have to agree with the other commenters. This article is well below the quality level I've come to expect from Anandtech.com. Excepting the images, every aspect is substandard. The edits in response to the other comments helped, but several parts (esp. the conclusion page) are still painful to read. I don't recognize the author, and I don't want to hate on him; however, this article reads like a very early rough draft.infoilrator - Friday, September 14, 2012 - link
Very good review, despite grammar patrol,Rosewill is doing very well in price/performance/quality here. I also find the Capstone line moredesirablee in price, especially when discounted.
bobbozzo - Friday, September 14, 2012 - link
bottom of page 2, change 37W to 37A.bobbozzo - Friday, September 14, 2012 - link
page 6: "performancs" should be performance.tynopik - Friday, September 14, 2012 - link
I do appreciate the breakdown of where exactly each connector is on each cable.But I would like to see more punishment of the PSUs. How do they hold up in extreme situations?
There have been reports that some PSUs don't work well with square-wave UPSs.
Do they hold up in hot conditions?
How do they handle low voltage (brownout) conditions? (say 90V)
How do they handle voltage swings? (Hook them up to a variac, start twisting the dial and see what kind of transients you can generate)
If they face a large load at once (say a bunch of hard drives spinning up simultaneously), how does it maintain the voltage levels?
If you short out a cable, will you blow up anything?
wrkingclass_hero - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
Someone get this man a job at Anandtech.