Today I'm going to watch the rotor disc on my power meter spin as I put a full load on a 1300W power supply. Hopefully the disc won't spin too fast as this unit is supposed to have 80 Plus Gold efficiency.

Today's power supply is the Super Flower Golden Green 1300W. A semi-modular 1300W power supply that id certified by 80 Plus as providing "Gold" efficiency levels.

Super Flower and I go way back and is quite honestly one of the reasons I do power supply reviews today. Back in 2001, when I was still the lead for tech support at Thompson's Computer Warehouse (TCWO), we bought a few of our product lines from a distributor in Minneapolis, Minnesota called "Traditional Technology Group", or TTGI for short. TTGI was where we bought a lot of, what was at the time, off-brand product from Asian companies like Thermaltake (a lot of Dragon Orb's), Gigabyte and Power Color. Initially, we were just getting Super Flower chassis with Topower power supplies in them. But at the time, Topower power supplies only went up to 350W and we had AMD Thunderbird 1GHz CPU's and Nvidia GeForce 4 graphics cards to power and needed something more substantial. This is when we started getting Super Flower chassis with TTGI branded Super Flower power supplies in them. The quality was always very good and the returns were few and far between.

Around 2008, it seemed like TTGI disappeared from the computer industry. Super Flower would still make the occasional appearance as an OEM for brands like Kingwin, Xion, NZXT and a little known brand called Mad Dog Multimedia. A few years have gone by with not much of a word coming from Super Flower. Then suddenly, around this time last year, we started seeing a number of highly efficient, high quality power supplies coming out of Super Flower under the Kingwin, NZXT and now Sentey brands. All have been reviewed here and all have done quite well. We've also seen a number of Super Flower branded units, but it seems that since TTGI disappeared, the only way we get an opportunity to buy an actual Super Flower branded unit is if we lived somewhere other than in the U.S. In fact, according to our contact at Super Flower, at the time of this review, this unit is only being sold in Korea where it's being sold for 328,000 won, which is just over $300 USD. Our contact at Super Flower ensures us that the unit will soon be available in Taiwan, China and Germany as well, but no pricing has been established.

An LED fan is something we haven't seen in a power supply in a long time. I personally like PC lighting, but I'm old school like that. Here it says that the fan uses "Japanese NMB Bearing". This is only where the name dropping begins. NMB is the brand of the bearing, and it is a good quality bearing.

Another name that's dropped is Infineon. Super Flower wants to make sure we know that this unit uses Infineon brand MOSFET's. The last name that's dropped is "Chemi-Con". The box states that there are "FPCON" capacitors used in this unit. FP stands for "Functional Polymer" and an FP Capacitor is what we tend to call a "solid cap". We'll see where these are used within the unit. Typically they're only implemented on the DC to DC VRM's for the non-primary rails (common practice). But the Super Flower built Kingwin Lazer Platinum actually used solid caps for almost all of the secondary side filtering.

Other than this, this panel also tells us that "Japanese Capacitors" are used. This is a good opportunity to drop another name, but they decided against it. Other than the solid capacitors, are the other capacitors Chemi-Con? Are they Panasonic? Rubycon? I guess we'll find out when we open the unit up.

This panel also points out that the efficiency of this unit meets both EuP and Energy Star standards. Also, Super Flower apparently has a patent on the transformer that's used within these power supplies.

The back of the box has some more information. Among this information is the operating temperature, which I'm surprised is only 40°C. The dimensions are also shown as 180mm x 150mm x 86mm, which is really quite small for something as powerful as a 1300W power supply.

The box Super Flower uses is very elaborate. I think the only other time I've seen a box like this is when Ultra launched their X3. The top is actually a panel that is held down with Velcro. Lift the panel and we are greeted by more marketing bullet points and another panel with a little window that allows us to see the power supply within.

As we open the box we find a power cord, four thumb screws for mounting the power supply into the chassis, a canvas-like bag to hold all of the modular cables and a user's guide. Note the modular cables are the "flat" type like Ultra's Flex Force cables or the cables that came with Corsair's HX series of power supplies. We'll count the cables on the next page.

The user's guide is pretty generic. It has three languages: English, German and Chinese. The first page has "general information", which is a big block of Engrish sentences, such as "The power supply consistent efforts in higher density product development and new advances in technology promise to bring you products of the best quality at all times". There is "important safety instructions" like "check the power supply voltage before installation", even though this power supply has active PFC with full range AC input capability. Finally, there's "easy troubleshooting". Easy like, "make sure the plug is properly inserted into the outlet."

The next two pages shows what safety certifications were applied for, has a brief description of the different 80 Plus levels and a description of the many possible modular interfaces your Super Flower power supply could potentially come with. The final item is a "optional surcharge", which apparently is a switch that can change the LED color or turn the LED off. This particular unit did not come with this optional surcharge.