Fractal Design Newton R3 1000W Power Supply Review

Introduction & Packaging Fractal Design kicked off its brand by making a single type of product: computer cases. However, like many other computer hardware brands Fractal Design made the decision to expand its product portfolio to encompass other things. One of Fractal Design's new product areas is power supplies and just like with their cases Fractal Design were adamant about making sure they reach the same high level of quality their brand is renowned for. On the topic of high quality it is time for the Newton R3 1000W power supply to enter. Fractal Design have pulled out all the stops with this new power supply model which features high quality 80 Plus Platinum capable internals, a modular design and a glossy white or black finish to match their computer cases. Fractal Design are also renowned for producing quiet cases; they were one of the first brands to mainstream the use of noise-dampening foam inside cases. Consequently it shouldn't surprise you that the Newton R3 1000W power supply offers a hybrid fan mode that doesn't spin up until the fan is needed. Even when the fan does spin up Fractal Design are claiming very low noise output as well as enhanced reliability for a ball-bearing based fan design. Other noteworthy selling points include the use of Japanese capacitors in this power supply's construction and an impressive 5 year warranty. Packaging and Contents The Newton R3 comes in one of the largest retail packages I have ever seen. The packaging uses a sleeve over a plain white box with a carry handle. The accessories are modest but are exactly what are required: a power cable, users manual, cable ties and some screws. A Closer Look - Exterior Power Supply Unit An all-white power supply is quite rare: fom my recollection the only other brand which offers an all-white power supply is Super Flower and interestingly that's on their Leadex Platinum line which is a direct competitor to this. The fan is also white on this power supply which gives a nice contrast under the fan grille where it is quite dark. The label that includes all of the certifications and DC output details is placed in a way that means it should be hidden in most cases. If you mount this power supply in a conventional mid-tower case, meaning at the bottom and with the fan facing up, the label is hidden from view. If you do it with the fan facing down then it isn't hidden. However, as power supplies become increasingly efficient there is no logical reason to mount the fan facing down: a separate intake-exhaust route isn't needed anymore. Not to mention that the fan facing upwards is a much nicer look. On the other side we find the Fractal Design branding but this appears to be the wrong way around. If you bottom mount with the fan facing up then it is upside down, if you bottom mount with the fan facing down it is hidden on the motherboard-tray side of the case. The base looks fairly plain but it isn't.... Using a photo editor to exaggerate contrast and highlights reveals a clearer picture of the embossed pattern. The Newton R3 uses a rather neat looking snowflake which is part of Fractal Design's branding. A few cables come pre-attached but there are also 8 modular cables clearly separated into peripheral and PCIe. There's also some extra ventilation at the bottom. On the rear there is a lot of ventilation for exhausting warm air. Cabling Fractal Design present the modular cables beautifully in a fold-out cable holder. You get a great selection of cables to utilise the 1000 watts on offer. There's an 8 pin EPS, two PCIe 6+2 pins, 12 SATA spread across four cables, four molex spread across two cables and a single FDD connector. There are also hard wired cables although these are not made to the same standard as the modular ones which is disappointing to say the least. Fixed to the power supply is a motherboard 24 pin, four 6+2 pin PCIe connectors and an 8 pin EPS connector for the CPU. In total you can run up to three high end graphics cards on a dual CPU socket motherboard, Fractal Design give you plenty of flexibility. A Closer Look - Interior For a 1000W 80 Plus Platinum unit I'd expect to see something made by Seasonic or Super Flower. However, in keeping with the recent trend of other power supply brands Fractal Design have thought outside the box and gone to a different OEM. With high-end and wattage 80 Plus Platinum units we have seen Cooler Master use Enhance, Corsair use Flextronics and Antec use Delta Electronics - all lesser well-known OEMs for the consumer power supply market. Fractal Design are bringing another fairly unknown OEM into play as they use ATNG Power. This platform has been analysed in depth by Jonny Guru and the conclusion is that it is actually of solid build quality and construction, despite its relatively unknown status. Fractal Design provide the 135mm fan for the power supply so we expect it will be fairly quiet, the maximum RPM is around 1400. The two primary side hold up capacitors are Nippon Chemi-Con made meaning they are Japanese capacitors. Both provide 270uF and are rated for 105 degrees celsius operation. Moving down to the secondary side and....hang on a minute: 100% Japanese capacitors you say? I don't think so. Teapo capacitors are still good, they have improved a lot in the past few years, but they still aren't on the same level as Japanese capacitors. We might expect secondary side (3.3 and 5 volt) performance to be a little "average" because of this. Here are a few more pictures of the rest of the internals. ATNG Power make extensive use of large heatsinks which helps to ensure the best cooling with the least amount of fan assistance. Test Procedure At eTeknix we take the power supply testing procedure very seriously and have invested a lot of resources into acquiring the appropriate testing equipment. For all power supply reviews we test the power supplies with dedicated power supply testing equipment. This means we are able to get the most accurate results from our testing as opposed to using software benchmarks (such as OCCT) or multi-meter readouts which are broadly inaccurate. Our test machinery is as follows: Sunmoon SM-5500ATE Active Load Tester (1200W rated) Stingray DS1M12 USB Oscilloscope Voltcraft DT-10L laser tachometer The eTeknix test procedure involves: Testing each power supply at 20/40/60/80/100% load (with balanced load across all rails) and measuring PFC (power factor correction), efficiency (actual power divided by power "pulled at the wall") and voltage regulation (deviance from expected voltages of 3.3/5/12 on the main rails). Measuring ripple with an oscilloscope at 20/40/60/80/100% load. Measuring fan speed after a stabilisation period of five minutes at each load scenario using the Voltcraft DT-10L laser tachometer and a reflective strip on the fan. Testing each power supply's OPP (Over Power Protection) mechanism and seeing how many watts each power supply can deliver before shutting down Other things to consider are that We recognise that a single yellow 12 volt cable can provide only 6 Amps before overheating (which corrupts voltage regulation and efficiency) and so we used an adequate number of cables for each power supply to ensure there is not efficiency loss from poor cables selection Our Sunmoon SM-5500ATE power supply tester is not capable of testing more than 300W on each of the 12 volt rails so where a power supply provides more than 300W on a 12 volt rail that power is distributed over multiple 12 volt rails on the load tester. For example a power supply with one 12 volt rail supplying 750 watts would be spread equally over three 12 volt rails on the load tester, a power supply with two 450W 12v rails would be spread over four 12v rails on the load tester, two 225W 12v rails for each of the 12v rails on the unit. We use the same time scale and horizontal millivolt scale on our oscilloscope for all ripple tests, that is a 20ms T/DIV (horizontal) and a 0.02 V/DIV (vertical) meaning the scale is from -80mV to +80mV, ATX spec dictates that the 12v rail must fall within 150mv of ripple and the 3.3/5 within 50mv so that scale allows us to include both 150 and 50mV peaks. (Some older PSU reviews use different scales which were later ditched as the visual representation they give is inadequate, in these reviews written measurements are provided only). Deviance is the terminology used to represent the way voltages diverge from the expected values Efficiency, PFC and Voltage Regulation Voltage Regulation To test voltage regulation we load the power supply to five different load scenarios that give an equal spread of load across every single rail. So that means 20% on all rails, 40% on all rails and so on. We then calculate the average deviance of each rail from its expected voltage. Crikey! Voltage regulation is top-tier, every rail averages within 1% of what it should be. Power Efficiency Power efficiency is measured by calculating actual supplied wattage divided by the wattage drawn at the wall/plug, multiplied by 100 to give a percentage. We then compare that to the particular 80 Plus certification the company claims to see if it meets that. You can see the 80 Plus certifications below, we always test 230v power supplies. The standard for Platinum is high and the Fractal Design Newton R3 only just manages to scrape onto it. In our testing it is a little under but it is within acceptable margin of error and production variance. Power Factor Correction Power Factor Correction is the ratio of the real power flowing to the load, to the apparent power in the circuit. The aim of PFC is to make the load circuitry that is power factor corrected appear purely resistive (apparent power equal to real power). In this case, the voltage and current are in phase and the reactive power consumption is zero. The closer the number to one the better as this allows the most efficient delivery of electrical power (Source - Wikipedia). PFC is excellent too. Clearly the active PFC implementation used is one of the stronger solutions on the market. Ripple Noise and Ripple can easily be measured by an oscilloscope. These show how much voltage fluctuation there is on a particular rail. We tested the rail stability of the 3.3 volt, 5 volt and 12 volt rails using an identical time and millivolt scale for all graphs. millivolt ripple is measured by the peak to peak size of the voltage curve. The latest ATX 12 volt version 2.3 specifications state that ripple from peak to peak must be no higher than 50 millivolts for the 3.3 volt and 5 volt rails, while the 12 volt rail is allowed up to 120 millivolts peak to peak to stay within specifications. Millivolt figures are stated to the closest increment of 5 given their variability. Load (%) 3.3V Ripple 5V Ripple 12V Ripple 20 8.2 7.4 11.8 40 9.4 8.8 13.4 60 12.6 10.6 19.2 80 16.4 17.2 24.4 100 18.6 20.2 33.6 12 volt performance is absolutely top-draw, less than 35mV peak to peak ripple at full load is well under ATX spec of 150mV. The 3.3 and 5 volt performance is good but it could be stronger. As expected the Teapo filtering capacitors for the secondary side let this unit down a little. Top PSUs using ALL Japanese capacitors will typically run with 7.5-12.5mV ripple on the 3.3 and 5 volt rails, not up to 20mV. For all intents and purposes this doesn't make much difference though. 3.3 volt @ 100% 5 volt @ 100% 12 volt @ 100% Over Power Protection and Max Wattage Power supplies often quote as having various protection mechanisms such and the most important of these is Over Power Protection. In our testing we crank up the power draw until the power supply either shuts down (meaning the OPP mechanism is present and working) or blows up (meaning it is either not present or not working). We then note the maximum power consumption before the power supply shut down (or blew up). The Newton R3 didn't want to stop providing power. The unit kept on going to a whopping 1795 watts before the over power protection shut the unit down. Fan Speed When testing in a power supply laboratory it is difficult to take fan noise readings as the noise from the Sunmoon test equipment and air conditioning corrupts everything. The next best thing in our circumstances was reading off the fan speed with a tachometer to get an idea for the noise. The ambient temperature during testing held constant at 22 degrees, with 1 degree of variation. Each power supply had a consistent time period of 5 minutes to stabilise between each load scenario. In my experience the following general relationships apply between noise levels and fan speeds, though it can vary greatly between the type of fan used. Below 800 RPM - Inaudible/Silent 800 to 1000 RPM - Barely audible 1000 - 1200 RPM - Audible but still quiet 1200 - 1400 RPM - Moderately noisy 1400 - 1800 RPM - Noisy 1800 RPM or higher - Intolerable The fan speed is one of this unit's major selling points. At all load scenarios it was very quiet but at lower loads the fan doesn't even come on making it ideal for silent builds. Final Thoughts Pricing The Fractal Design Newton R3 1000W is priced at $185 on Amazon in the USA and £150 at Amazon in the UK. It comes with a 5 year warranty. Conclusion The market for 1000W 80 Plus Platinum power supplies is fairly small but there's still a lot of competition. Interestingly Fractal Design's decision to use a new OEM vendor has paid great dividends. The Newton R3 1000W offers up incredible value for money coming in around 10-20% less than rival solutions from the likes of Antec Corsair, EVGA, Rosewill, Seasonic and XFX. Despite being cheaper, nothing is really lost on the performance side as this unit has all the hallmarks of a high end power supply: excellent voltage regulation, quiet operation, superb efficiency and PFC. There are a few "trade-offs" to be made compared to some rival products. Firstly, the design is not fully modular and for some people that could be a deal breaker. Secondly, the 3.3 and 5 volt regulation is good but could be better, it doesn't match the excellence offered by the 12 volt regulation on this unit. In the grand scheme of things those two trade-offs are minor and impact the user-experience very little. The Newton R3 has a lot going for it in terms of performance, pricing and its unique looks. Fractal Design may still be a small player in the PSU market but on this performance they definitely deserve your attention. Pros Platinum efficiency Silent operation Excellent voltage regulation Unique aesthetics 5 year warranty High PFC Competitive pricing Cons Not fully modular Doesn't use all Japanese capacitors as advertised "For what it is the Fractal Design Newton R3 1000W power supply offers incredible value for money. If you're in the market for a Platinum rated power supply but want the most for your money then this is a power supply to strongly consider." Thank you to Fractal Design for providing this review sample.