InWin 1500W Commander

An ammo box without the firepower.

We were going to spend this whole review mocking this PSU, but we were pulled up by the Editor because it would have been all humour and no substance. And in a clap of apathetic genius, we discovered the most accurate summary of this power supply.

Despite its 1500W label, militaristic styling and generic OEM rebranding, it could only spin up 21 drives from a standing start. It didn’t do this very well: our Adaptec card reported that two drives were missing from the array. We charitably drew the performance line at 20 drives, after a day’s worth of sustained stress testing and much deliberation.

It’s got an arseload of 12V PCI-e plugs, two of which are part of the loom and can’t be removed. The muted green chassis’ side is festooned with the same unimportant promotional garbage that is printed all over the cardboard box it ships in (namely ‘14cm fan’, ‘Support SLI’, ‘Efficiency’, ‘Modularised’ and other such bollocks, all of which are printed on the side that’s visible through your case window) in a yellow font that makes it look like some sort of promotional military ammo box that might be handed out at a school careers night.

There’s really nothing special about this, except it somehow manages to be an inanimate object with an ego.