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Ultra X-Pro 600W EE

This Ultra PSU falls into a category that is drawing more and more attention now days, that being the "Energy Efficient" niche. Can 600 watts of power really be EE, quiet, and powerful all at the same time? Is it worthy of your custom system?

Overview

The first thing we are going to look at with the X-Pro 600W EE is its packaging, accessories, and documentation. While none of these items is a real make or break item for a power supply the packaging quite often contains a lot of information about the product we are purchasing. The inclusion of an owner’s manual that provides actual information about our product is also of great help. Accessories are almost unnecessary with a power supply as the unit is self contained, unless it is modular, but there cases where a manufacturer can include useful accessories to make installation, routing and use more efficient.

As previously covered in our X-Pro 750W evaluation the Ultra packaging contains a fair amount of information about our power supply that we will break down below in table form. Included on the box is the very conspicuous Ultra Lifetime Warranty sticker. However, there is a very slight caveat to that Limited Lifetime Warranty that is not listed on the box or the manual. The information regarding this caveat is readily available though from the X-Pro 600W product page and Ultra’s warranty section.

To ensure your complete satisfaction, all Ultra Products Power Supplies and Cases now carry a three year warranty that they will be free from defects in materials or workmanship. In addition, that warranty is upgradable to a LIFETIME warranty by simply registering online. Additionally, all our other products carry a one-year warranty which is also upgradable to a three year warranty. At Ultra, customer service is our most important mission. That’s why every Ultra product must meet the highest industry standards for quality and reliability. And our warranty program is second to none.

As we learn from Ultra’s webpage the unit comes standard with a 3 year warranty until we register online, which for the added lifespan of the warranty is not too much of a burden. The Lifetime warranty is a good sign that Ultra believes in their product enough to put themselves on the hook for a long time.

Also on the box we find various safety certifications, an SLI ready stamp, and an 85% efficiency stamp. A quick check of SLIZone website shows that the X-Pro 600W is indeed certified for SLI but is categorized in the nebulous sounding "For all other SLI PC configurations" category. The final point of interest before leaving the packaging is the 85% efficiency sticker. This is one of the major selling points of this unit and is prominently marked as such on Ultra's website and on the packaging. The 85% efficiency number however, is at typical load as defined by a 300w load according the user manual, and an efficiency of 79.5% at 600w so don't expect greater than 80% efficiency if you are really pushing the limits of this unit.

From this information we find that the X-Pro 600W EE has 72% of its 600w capacity available on the 12v rail. We also see from the connector count that the unit has 2 PCI-Express connectors. So native support for PCI-Express is not impeding its certification on the SLI scale. Beyond that though we find both an 8pin EPS connector along with 8 Molex and 4 SATA connectors. Like the X-Pro 750W this unit won't support large SATA raid arrays natively but given it's general makeup that isn't surprising as this unit does not appear to be aimed at an environment that would dictate a multitude of SATA drives.

Once again, like with Ultra X-Pro 750W packaging we find the Ultra X-Pro 600W EE packaging contains the power supply, a bag of mounting screws, a user manual, and some silica. All pretty standard save for the manual. The manual isn’t particularly thick at 8 pages and doesn’t include the warranty information but it does include the installation instructions, with pictures, and almost all the specifications of the unit in physical/electrical terms to include a pinout of the connectors. This is something some people may not appreciate but the inclusion of them was something that pretty well says full disclosure to the user and was greatly appreciated. Overall the packaging on this unit was very informative and almost identical to the X-Pro 750W.