Final Thoughts
If you noticed this article is titled as a technical preview rather than a review. We actually haven’t reviewed power supplies for a while. The main reason is that we do not have a load tester to do proper testing and monitoring. All of the available software monitoring solutions don’t seem to be accurate either. So for those reasons we really do not review power supplies. But Fractal Design sent this unit over and we definitely wanted to tell you what we thought about it.
My two favorite features of this unit are its size and the cabling. Being only 150 mm long means that this unit is going to easily fit in any case that supports a normal ATX power supply. I’ve reviewed quite a lot of cases over the years and it is really frustrating when your power supply is too long to fit. The cabling on this unit is quite awesome. First it is modular and second it is quite flexible. Fractal Design calls these cables their UltraFlex cables, which at first glance appear to be the flat cabling we are all used to. I thought this as well, but then I compared it with flat cabling from another power supply and it is far more flexible. This is going to make running and connecting cables much easier.
Under the hood of the unit you have 105°C Japanese Polymer capacitors with low ESR, long life and excellent stability, a Supervisor IC which provides Over Power Protection, Over Voltage Protection, Short Circuit Protection, Under Voltage Protection, Over Current Protection and Over Temperature Protection. And of course you have to remember that this is an 80PLUS Platinum rated unit, so it will be 92% efficient at 50% load and 89% efficient at 100% load.
As a reminder Fractal Design will be offering the Ion+ in 560W, 660W, 760W, and 860W versions. The range starts at $99.99 for the 560W and going up to $129.99 for the 860W unit we took a look at today. Overall I think that the Fractal Design Ion+ 860p would be a great unit for any new build.
Pros:
– Small and compact size
– New UltraFlex cables
– Modular
– Zero RPM fan mode
– 80PLUS Platinum rating
Cons:
– Zero RPM switch won’t be easily accessible once installed
