Antec Signature 850W PSU

Comparative Efficiency

While not chart topping, the Antec Signature 850W is certainly up in the top three consistently and sits in the upper niche on the chart filled by the Be Quiet! Dark Power Pro 650W, the Cooler Master Ultimate UCP 900W and briefly the Corsair TX750W PSUs.

It's slightly more efficient than the BFG ES Series 800W, and even the Corsair HX1000W at their relative efficiencies. However, the Cooler Master just pips it to the post on all accounts (except 20 percent, which we currently don't have enough comparative data for to graph).

Value

Firstly, let’s reiterate the question rose in the Cooler Master Ultimate UCP 900W review - does the extra cost warrant the better efficiency? Being more efficient is better there's no doubt, but at what cost does being one of the most efficient bring you? On paper, no, unless you run it at full load for most of its life you’ll not see the payback for the extra cash compared to cheaper alternatives. At £135 it's an expensive PSU, there's no doubt, however with its Delta manufacture and quality hardware inside I want to say it's worth it, I really do.


It’s just better than the also expensive BFG ES Series 800W and it's a couple of percent more efficient than the PC Power & Cooling designed OCZ EliteXStream 800W, although the OCZ is almost half the price - does a few percent higher efficiency warrant the significant extra cost? Both are black and both are quiet and both have five year warranties, but OCZ’s PowerSwap is better than anything else out there and is available globally.

It costs about the same as the Akasa PowerMax 1000W, and while the Akasa features better 16 AWG cabling, instead of the 18 AWG cables used here, the two are leagues apart in terms of almost everything else.

The advantage the Antec has is that it's semi modular, and while we don't directly compare modular to non-modular, it's a distinctly lacking features in this end of the market. The Corsair HX1000W is semi-modular too, but the Cooler Master Ultimate, the BFG ES and the OCZ Elite are all a mass of cables only.

I have all these arguments against it with it being expensive and I was all set to like the Cooler Master Ultimate UCP 900W more having seen the facilities and talked to engineering in Taiwan during the summer, but I find myself the other way around, trying to find a weighty justification for the Antec over the cheaper OCZ in particular. It feels like it's worth the money as a package, not just because some guy stamped a bit of card with “passed” a dozen times.

Final Thoughts

While we don't like the cables so much because they look ugly and they miss a few features, technically they are very good and between them and the modular connectors they are both of high quality to match the rest of the unit. Antec has pulled through in that regard and instead of just going to Delta, telling it to build it a PSU and slapping an Antec badge on it; it's thought about the product as a whole.

The extra efficiency won't offset the extra cost, but £135 for the hardware you get in the black box isn't particularly bad value. Whether you go for this or the recently lower priced Cooler Master Ultimate UCP 900W will get you an excellent PSU either way – if we had reviewed the Cooler Master a week later at £146 and not £160+ it would have been recommended too. With regards to the Antec Signature 850W, the bottom line is that if you do want to splash out on a truly premium purchase, this is certainly one to keep high up on the short list.

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• 10/10

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• 9/10

• Features
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• 9/10

• Value
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• 7/10

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• 9/10

Score Guide