I’ve been reviewing a lot of high-end power supplies lately. Most noteworthy of these was the SLI Ready Power Supply Roundup, of which went down a storm with readers. What I’ve realized is that there is a big consumer buzz surrounding high output power supplies, and with the introduction of 850W power supplies and higher, it’s not going to change any time soon. I suppose it’s easy to get caught up in all of this hype, with every website out there droning it into you that “power supplies are crucially important” and “don’t buy Q-tech, even if you’re on a homeless person’s budget”. A lot of users are now future proofing for that potential SLI upgrade they will probably never get around to, and this is causing a huge number of people to buy or consider 600W models than actually need to.

Scanning around popular e-tailers show that the difference in price between identical 500W and 600W power supplies is roughly £25 to £30 and so I feel it is important to make people very aware that you should ignore 600W models unless you are a seriously heavy overclocker or plan on running 6800 Ultra SLI or above along with other components that are suitably expensive.

As already noted, while I do recommend 600W power supplies to people on the cutting edge, you can and should also consider 500W models for this purpose, too. PC Power & Cooling proved that a well engineered 500W power supply can easily power anything available today without even breaking a sweat. If you will never run SLI and you don’t overclock, a 400W power supply will probably suffice, but for that piece of mind that is so important I recommend most users go for 500W models. For this reason alone I thought it was about time I took a look at some 500W models. This is the first of those reviews, and I’m going to write up a new power supply roundup soon to cover the 500W power supply arena, so keep checking back for that!

The power supply I’ll be looking at today is the Enermax 500W Liberty ATX 2.2 compliant modular power supply. So please read on to find out how it performed.