Feed: AnandTech
Feed Link: https://www.anandtech.com
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Title: The Enermax PlatiGemini 1200W ATX 3.1 + ATX12VO PSU Review: The Swiss
Army Knife

Date: Tue, 02 Jul 2024 08:00:00 EDT
Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/21412/the-ener...

In the retail PC PSU space, most of the focus on new standards and their
capabilities in the past couple of years has been on ATX 3.0 and it's quick
follow-up successor, ATX 3.1. And while the revised ATX standard is certainly
the most important new standard for the rank-and-file PC builder, it's not
the only standard that has been released as of late. Intel and its partners
have also developed a standard, that in some respects, goes even farther out
by dropping some of the legacy aspects of ATX and its increasingly esoteric
secondary voltages: ATX12VO.

Short for "ATX 12 Volts Only", ATX12VO is a standard that's been slower to
take off as it makes a pretty hard break with backwards compatibility. But
with so many motherboard functions running off of 12V (CPUs and GPUs, for a
start), the need for a PSU to provide secondary voltages like 3.3V and 5V
just aren't what they once were 20 years ago - or even 10. So we've slowly
seen PC manufacturers and motherboard makers test the waters, with a handful
of designs using the more petite ATX standard.

Meanwhile on the power supply side of things, the outcome has been a bit more
interesting, if messy. While ATX12VO motherboards need matching PSUs, there's
nothing to say that such a PSU can only be ATX12VO. To reference an ancient
meme, the thought at some PSU manufacturers has been "why not both?", leading
to high-end PSUs that can bridge the compatibility gap by offering both ATX
3.1 and ATX12VO compatibility.

The first example of such a PSU to make it in our labs is Enermax's new
PlatiGemini 1200W PSU. Designed to be the Swiss knife of modern top-tier PCs,
Enermax's PSU offers support for both ATX 3.1 and ATX12VO - ensuring it can
power virtually any PC - while driving both modes with a sizeable 1200W
design that can pretty much power virtually any desktop PC one can hope to
build today. Plus, with features like fully modular cables with per-wire
sleeving, a dynamic hybrid fan control for optimal cooling, and advanced
power topologies, the PlatiGemini 1200W aims to deliver both reliability and
performance on top of its multi-mode compatibility. The end result is a very
interesting (if premium) product that can do it all.

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