What's in the Box?



The TurboCool 850 SSI is a massive beast at 15cm x 8 cm x 23cm she's long, lean and has substantial weight. I once thought weight was a prima facie indicator of quality, I'm reversing my position in this respect as I believe I'm prejudiced from my years as an Audiophile. Tube Amplifiers are very different in their goal and they require huge copper wound transformers, and coke-can sized capacitors to perform their task.

Books have been written on this subject and if there's one hobby where people are even more zealous about their hardware it's high-end audio. As a brief example the Wavac which includes the Wavac SH-833 is a 150w per channel (monoblocs) single-ended tube amp with power supplies which weigh approximately 200Kg for the pair and cost $350,000 and that's just the amps, we haven't even begun to discuss the pre-amp. The mentality behind High-End audio is difficult to shed. Nonetheless for its peak 950W power the TurboCool 850 SSI isn't exceedingly heavy. Its innards are markedly different from any other PSU I've seen including those built by PCP&C, for it is the first truly proprietary rail power supply.




Parts are well organized taking full advantage of the single exhaust fan design and laid out in a parallel linear fashion where the "flow" of the circuitry is clearly visible.


Potentiometers




This is not the first BTX ready PSU where I've seen "sealed" potentiometers and while the seals are easily broken, recent Form Factors.org ATX12V Design Guide Rev.2.2 and SSI (Server System Infrastructure) EPS12V Rev.2.8 place 17A limits on 12V rails to maintain 240VA in accordance with UL EN60950 (explained here) safety standards. Pertinent sections of these guidelines can be found below.




In past models PCP&C placed access holes in the enclosure which allowed the insertion of a screwdriver to adjust pots "on the fly". While I've been an advocate of tunable pots, ultimately the goal is to build a power supply where such adjustments aren't necessary.

If designed correctly, rails should remain indefatigable regardless of load, providing a lifetime of service without a need for end-user "fine tuning." Of course in the realm of the PC-Enthusiast this is often construed as a limitation, comparative to a lack of multiplier adjustments on Intel CPUs. Even Intel has capitulated allowing a single 14x (2.8GHz) multiplier option on recent processors. The reasoning behind this was not to appease Enthusiast's or Overclockers, but to take full advantage of DDR2 frequencies.