Antec Neo HE 500W vs. Enermax Liberty 500W

This is the Ultimate PSU Showdown!

Which is better at delivering more power? I know the Antec Neo HE has 3 12v rails, but is this always beneficial for a heavy load? The Liberty has 22A on each rail, so I guess more power could be used on on rail. The total output is 32A I believe.

I think I read that the Antec Neo HEs are not 80% efficient as claimed. Its in the high 70%s. However, the Enermax Libertys look great and the efficiency is more than 80%, is this right?

If you had a decision to make on buying a power supply for a overclocking rig, which would you choose?

The problem is that there is no perfect PSU. There are small differences such as noise, cable configuration, efficiency, cost, looks, fans and power distribution that ultimately determine which PSU a customer purchases.

Some might say the cable layout of enermax is annoying due to the interleaving of the SATA and molex plugs on the cable. However the antec has far fewer plugs (and wires) but they are all of one type.

As for the noise, one cannot comment at this stage as we don't have any independent test results. However we do know that the NeoHe performs very similarly to the Seasonic S12 range at the 250W mark according to the review at SPCR. Previous reviews of enermax products at SPCR have shown that they are not really targeted for silencers.

Power distribution - There are great differences between these two products. The NeoHE supplies a maximum of 456W or 38A at 12v while the Enermax supplies 384W or 32A at 12v. Because the total amperage of all 12v rails exceeds the maximum allowable, it gives you some flexibility in loading up the PSU, knowing that you are not likely to reach the maximum output of any one single rail before hitting the total maximum.
However, while the NeoHe supplies more 12v power it has less 3.3 and 5v power. Ie 23A @3.3v and 17A@5v. The enermax supplies [email protected] and 30A@5v.

Because both PSUs have their strengths and weakness in terms of power, you really need to ask yourself what you are going to be using them for. The enermax would be suitable for a high end server with a gazillion hard drives, as I would expect the NeoHE to run out of 5v current after you added about 10-15 HDDs to a system.
Now the NeoHE would be more suitable if you were expected to be using a lot of 12v power, such as dual CPUs, SLI etc, or even a 4 way SLI setup: http://www.hkepc.com/hwdb/nf4slix16-3.htm knowing that GTX's use 80W per card as per Xbit lab's testing, we know that we need 320W at 12V just for graphics alone. Say we need another 120W for the CPU bringing us up to 440W, which PSU are you going to choose?
Ok, if you like the enermax you could go and get the 620W version, but that still only gives us 36A, 2A shy of the antec's 38. However the Antec 550W NeoHe supplies 42A @ 12v or 504W!
Making this decision allows you to save money buy purchasing the power capacity where you are going to use it.



As per efficiency, we have any independent testing atm to comment, but we know they both have active PFC (not that that's at all related to PSU efficiency or domestic electricity bills).

Also, as per defined in
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/other/display/psu-methodology.html and
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/other/display/powerful-psu.html
The antec Neo HE appears to have individual voltage regulation for all 3 rails while Enermax does not. This gives similar load regulation characteristics such as Seasonic S12, Trupower, Topower P6 series, OCZ powerstream, Tegan, PCP@C while the Enermax liberty uses the old fashioned group regulation method... Powering our 4 way SLI system with 90% of the load on the 12v rail, it's pretty obvious which one is going to be more suitable for such a system.

It seems that the antec is the cheaper choice, you could very comfortably power an SLI system off the 430w model, offering 384W or 32A @ 12V provided you have a desktop system with a single proc of around 120W and only a handful of drives while you'd need the 500W version if you wanted to go for the Enermax.

So in conclusion: Enermax Liberty = lots of Disk drives (also shown by lots of cables)
NeoHE= Lots of silicon, 12v phase change compressors, Peltiers etc.

Great post retrofitter, that was really helpful and I appreciate it. Truly amazing .

No, I will not running many hard drives. I will run 1 hard drive, 2 at most. But I will be heavily overclocking with a non-SLI setup. So for this, the Antec NeoHEs are a bit better choice since they have more power on the 12V? I believe that the Antec NeoHEs have no problems with boards other than the Asuses and their early revisions.

Given that the power supply has a lifetime of around 80,000 hours or 8 years, you really need to predict what your demands are going to be in 4 years time.

I need a new power supply, which is why I wrote that up. I have decided that the NeoHe is right for me. My old PSU, a 350w with internals that pass the eye test,:

ie an unknown name but honestly engineered only supplies 16A@12v or 144w continuous. I also live in Australia, where we are expecting the NeoHes to hit the stores in December 5th! (But first I wait till November 7th to evaluate the cost/performance of the 7800GTX 512MB). At current prices, the X1800XT matches the GTX when comparing FEAR in a price/performance respect, however but looses points in the electricity/heat/noise/crossfire platform department. So I am going to try to run my proposed 3800x2 + 7800GTX off this PSU. I figure i'll just not plug in the PCIe cable to keep the card running at 275MHz clock at its reduced voltage.
Perhaps in a few more years Hard disks will start using the 3.3v rail for their power so we can get closer to the total power output of the NeoHE if we had a HDD laden server.

Also I base my HDD power calcs on a barracuda IV 40GB, measuring .8A@5v .4A@12v seek and 1.1A@12v spin up (yes I know the seagate website has other graphs showing 2A peak but the average is around 1A according to my multimeter) .