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- Date:
- Wednesday, December 03, 2008
- Author:
- Paul Johnson
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
Tagan BZ 1300W PSU
Tagan delivers some impressive features in this 1300 watt powerhouse of a PSU. It is advertised as future proof and guaranteed to last, but does it deliver the full 1300 watts of advertised power under our test conditions?
Overview
The first thing we are going to look at with the Tagan BZ 1300W power supply 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.
The Tagan BZ 1300W packaging is certainly one of the more interesting we have seen to date. Indeed the packaging has a car, in space no less, with the slogan “Rockability for the Century” and a "PipeRock" stamp proudly covering the front. Wait………did I just buy an RC car? Ok, moving on. The rear of the packaging is covered in marketing points in no less than 8 languages. These points include things such as “over 80% efficient,” “Turbo Mode offers higher power to heavy-loading devise and Normal Mode for stable DC Output,” “Four rails of 12v rails for independent devices demands,” “Dual Transformer Technology is the best power design for Dual-Core CPU,” and SLI certification. Now, while a lot of those points are simply marketing speak, a couple are of actual interest today and we will be looking at those in detail later (i.e. 80% efficiency and SLI support). Among the marketing speak though there are a couple of odd things that I would like to expound upon. The first being the “Turbo Mode offers higher power to heavy-loading devise and Normal Mode for stable DC Output” and “Four rails of 12v rails for independent devices demands” points. To start with the unit is advertised as having six 12v rails everywhere on the power labels not four so the second point seems to have not been edited before printing. The Turbo Mode concept is a bit dubious without even addressing the way it is advertised (my power is only stable in Normal Mode? Surely that can’t be right). Lastly, all of the Topower “Turbo Mode” units we have seen to date are really single 12v rail units that are dressed up to look like they adhere to the now waived 240VA restriction so this advertising point is kind of moot.
Moving on, the Tagan BZ 1300W is also advertised as being 80% efficient but at the time of writing the 80Plus website does not list the BZ 1300W as being 80Plus certified. This could be due to the unit being new to market or it could be that while 80% efficient at certain loads the unit is not 80% efficient across the 80Plus standard testing suite. On the SLI front, we find that the BZ1300 is certified for up to tri-260 GTX SLI which is very good, one would have to think though that a 1300 watt PSU would have passed tri-SLI GTX 280 testing as well, but that is not denoted. This is all capped off with a 3 year warranty which is certainly not the shortest we have seen, but for an enthusiast class product it is on the short side. Further, this warranty information was not included anywhere with the unit I received and was only found on Tagan’s website as detailed below:
The start of the warranty period is the documented date of the customer's purchase of the product from Tagan's authorized reseller. In the absence of a documented purchase date, the start of the warranty period will be the date Tagan originally shipped the product from its point of manufacture to Tagan's customer.
• Tagan 36 months from date of purchase
• Icy Box / Aplus case 12 months from date of purchase
• Six (6) months for the following consumable parts and accessories batteries, chargers, stands and cables
1300 Watts of Power You Can't Use
The Tagan BZ 1300W power label and connector count provides for a unit that should be capable of running literally any configuration 99% of users could throw at it with ease. There are some interesting points of note in this information including the fact that while labeled as having six 12v rails the unit is a single 12v rail unit with 92A available on it. While this is certainly very good, the 5v and 3.3v rails have a combined 170w available to them and there is a total cap of 1260w on the 12/5v/3.3v rails. That means in order to actually get 1300 watts out of this unit, you have to use 40w from the -12v and +5vsb. This is really kind of a disservice to users as it is very unlikely that a user is going to use 10-12 watts from the -12v or 30 watts from the +5vsb. In other words, the 1300w rating here is possibly valid but the reality is that users won’t be able to use that whole 1300 watts the unit is rated for. Unless of course you are going to try and cook via the onboard USB ports. Beyond that the unit does feature six PCI-Express connectors (all of the 8-pin PCI-Express connectors are modified 8-pin connectors), twelve SATA connectors for RAID arrays or optical drives, and seven Molex connectors for your legacy peripherals. However since the unit is partially modular, cable management should be a bit easier than the numbers would indicate.
Once we open the Tagan BZ 1300W packaging we find a large assortment of items including the power supply, a fabric case holding the modular connectors, a plastic bag (with gloves, a rubber gasket, and screw driver inside), a power cord, and user manual. The extra items included with the Tagan BZ 1300W are certainly interesting and useful if you like the whole gloved look while building a system. At any rate, it certainly sets the BZ 1300W apart from other units as it is the first unit I have ever had in for review that had a pair of gloves along for the ride. The user manual is 44 pages long in 8 languages. After reading the manual I find that the effort put into the extras may have been better spent on the documentation as while each section has 5 pages the information is woefully incomplete, already available, or wrong. The manual lists the accessories found in your box, the cable count (for every BZ series unit), some installation instructions, and the pinout/rail distribution. Unfortunately, that is all that is included. No other electrical or physical specifications and no warranty information at all. In fact the support information includes the following:
If you have any question about repair or return, please call Service Hotline Germany: 0800/8242648
and
Email our U.K. support team: service@nanopoint.co.uk
It is good that Tagan gives some contact information, however it is too bad the information is all for the other side of the Atlantic though. Now after digging through the Tagan website the contact address for service in the US is service_usa@tagan.com in case users need this information. Overall, it would be helpful if Tagan listed this information or the warranty, or both, in the manual since the product was shipped and marketed in the US.