See the amazing jumping 5V rail! Huntkey tries to deliver the power, but just doesn't quite get there.
When you sit down to start piecing together a brand-new rig, the temptation to skimp on a few parts can be pretty strong. You might be browsing through cases online, and odds are that you'll see a few that come with a power supply - a whole unit, practically for nothing! Well, it turns out that there's a reason they can include a PSU with a case for a grand total of eighty bucks: both are generally shoddy quality and destined to explode with only the slightest encouragement. And that's if you're lucky!
Thankfully it seems you don't have to spend a huge sum of cash to get a decent unit, and the Huntkey Jumper 550W on display sits smack-bang in the middle of the Antec and Coolermaster competition. As its name suggests, it is rated by Huntkey for 550W, though it boasts the ability to supply up to 648W through the four 12V rails rated at 16A, 16A, 14A and 8A. It's also only certified for 80PLUS, with an average of 82 per cent efficiency.
The included cables are mainly modular, though they are quite short in length and are appropriate for smaller ATX builds. There are six peripheral cables offering SATA and molex, but only four sockets to plug them into, offering a nice amount of choice. There's also enough PCIe connectors to run two decently-powerful graphics cards or a single high-end card.
We loaded the Jumper up with a workload and threw our multimeters at it, returning 12.153V and a concerning 4.4060V on the 12V and 5V rails respectively. There didn't appear to be any instability on the 12V rail, even though the 5V rail idled at anywhere from 4.6V to 4.75V, seemingly bouncing around at random. In all, the Jumper 550W is a decently priced unit that can power a mid-range system, and though we'd prefer a little more efficiency, it is certainly far better than a cheap bundled unit.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012