Antec EarthWatts Platinum 650W Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

Antec’s Earthwatts Platinum 650W power supply costs £95.99 in the UK and $104.99 in the USA.

Conclusion

Antec’s EarthWatts Platinum 650W power supply is a bit of a mixed bag. On the face of it this power supply is a steal at £85/$105 because there’s no way you could pick up an 80 Plus Platinum power supply of a similar wattage for a similar price made by anyone else. It’s also a very quiet power supply as a result of being very efficient and it benefits from solid voltage regulation, reasonably good noise & ripple suppression and good PFC performance. Based on those aspects the EarthWatts Platinum 650W power supply from Antec is a solid power supply.

Yet there are some, quite significant, shortfalls. Firstly, this power supply is rated as 80 Plus Platinum yet in our testing it failed to reach 80 Plus Platinum standards at 50% and 100% load. It only managed to meet it at 20% load. In my opinion that isn’t acceptable for a power supply marketed as a Platinum series. I can imagine that Antec have engineered this power supply to be 80 Plus Platinum on 115V circuits since the box states up to 93% efficiency yet to achieve 80 Plus Platinum on a 230-250VAC circuit you’d need to have 94% efficiency. Either way we didn’t see 80 Plus Platinum results and that’s not acceptable whichever way you brush that up. The power supply was still pretty close to 80 Plus Platinum and we know the 80 Plus organisation may have tested using a different method in which this PSU does achieve its certification, but we can only go on what our results show. This power supply is more like a jazzed up 80 Plus Gold unit based on our results. Secondly, Antec only include two PCIe 6+2 pin connectors. Imagine that, you’ve got 650W of power – easily enough for a 4960X at 4.5GHz with a pair of GTX 760s or R9 270Xs and you can’t natively support two GPUs because of a lack of connectors. To be brutally honest that isn’t something that can be easily overlooked, part of this product’s design process should have considered what connectors are required to properly use the 650W of power.

Pros

• Very High Efficiency
• Solid voltage regulation
• Good PFC performance
• Quiet

Cons

• Doesn’t meet 80 Plus Platinum in our testing
• Mediocre selection of connectors – not enough to realistically even use 650W
• Very pricey given the above two criticisms
• Non modular
• Only a 3 year warranty – not exactly impressive for an “80 Plus Platinum” unit of this wattage and price

“Antec’s Earthwatts Platinum 650W power supply fails to impress due to a combination of inadequate cabling and slightly below expected performance. While the power supply itself is a solid performer in most areas we can’t help but feel underwhelmed by the fact we didn’t actually get 80 Plus Platinum efficiency. There is also no way you could realistically use all 650W due to the decision to limit this unit to just 2 PCIe 6+2 pin connectors. If Antec dropped the price, tweaked the efficiency of this unit up a little and rethought the cabling options then this PSU would be a good buy at its current price.”

Thank you to Antec for providing this review sample.