Tagan 1300

Blinky lights and plastic sheathing, oh my.

1300 watts? Bah! Big Willy thinks otherwise. In spite of the large sticker wattage, we were only able to get 19 drives up and running.

In its defence, all the rails on the Tagan were consistent throughout our tests; however the five volt line averaged a forgettably low 4.8-ish volts throughout. This would not be worth mentioning if the 12 and 3.3 volt lines were 0.1 volts higher than what physics experiment land readings should have been.

The comfortingly heavy Tagan features the most irritating modular plug system in the roundup. Instead of using connectors that lock once you push them in, you’ve got to screw the connector in with a threaded washer-thing after you plug them in. As an added bonus, this completes a circuit that illuminates a ring around the power socket of the PSU – red and green for PCI-e connectors, blue for peripherals. More often than not, this flickers intermittently and is actually quite annoying.

The PCI-e cables are not only braided, they’re coated in plastic, presumably so you can identify them by touch instead of sight or some equally dubious reason. There are also six and eight pin PCI-e plugs attached directly to the unit.

And it looks kinda late 70’s, if you ask us. You know: coloured lights, plastic jackets, matte black utilitarian design, nine screws on the power connection panel... or are we just going crazy?