Seasonic X-850 850W 80 Plus Gold ATX12V/EPS12V Power Supply

Seasonic is well known to make power supplies with high end components such as Nippon Chemicon, capacitors from Japan, durable Sanyo San Ace dual ball-bearing fan, excellent input filtering, regulation, and overall premium build quality. Currently for the last 15 years Seasonic has been my primary brand of power supplies I would use for my builds as well as my friends and family. With the crazy weather we've experienced the last few months, it's not uncommon for us to experience brown outs or intermittent black outs. Even after all of the electrical problems in my neighborhood my 2 machines running both the Seasonic X-850 and Seasonic Platinum 760 are still holding up quite nicely. Since my Platinum replaced a competitor's product (one with a sail) that failed last summer, I've been migrating all of my equipment to UPSs for battery backup and additional protection. That said, owning a UPS does NOT guarantee reliable operation of a power supply. Case and point, last night a longtime good friend of mine called up from out of state for assistance troubleshooting his PC that refused to power back on after a power outage. He had his machine connected to a battery backup, lost power then proceeded to power off his equipment. After utility power came back on, his PC refused to power on or POST. After some basic troubleshooting, I've had him disconnect the power supply from his components and short the green pin to a black pin on the ATX24 connector to manually power on. No dice, the fan didn't spin. To verify once more, I had him use his multimeter to read the DC rails, Yellow for 12v, Red for 5v, and orange for 3.3v; only the 3.3v rail output anything. It's dead Jim. He also did not use a Seasonic Power supply, instead he opted for one that was on sale at a big box store.The point of the story being, his Non Seasonic power supply was approximately 4 years old when it died past it's warranty, and my dead corsair also lasted a little past it's 3 year warranty. As for Seasonic, since 2002, I've owned a few of their units. None has come to mind that has failed on me yet. I've also given away an old 620W 80plus model I've purchased in 2006 that's still kicking to this day confined in a desk cubby with inadequate air flow.I can babble on for hours about how great this unit is on efficiency, how quiet it is, build quality, rail quality, customer service, etc.But here's what it boils down to:"How reliable is this unit?" Very reliable. "What happens if this fails?" Contact Seasonic, they'll ship you a replacement unit. Also this won't kill motherboards and components like the Bestec power supplies did. (Look that one up guys)"Why buy this when I can buy 100000W brand XYZ power supply for half as much?" When you spend $300+ for a CPU, $400 for a GPU, $150 for a case, you can budget some money in a quality power supply that will easily outlast your video card in terms of functional use. Go ahead, save some money, buy a cheap crap PSU, but don't cry when your expensive part fails.

UPDATE, 2013/11/02: unfortunately, the power supply seems to be dead, after working perfectly for 9 months.Last week, my computer began to "not power up". I pressed the power switch, and nothing. Then, after leaving the supply turned off for an hour or so, the PC would boot up again and function normally.This happened twice. After that, no more. It does not turn on.What's strange is this: the power supply always whined a bit while on, very faintly - I could hear it only with my ear close to the unit, a steady "eeeeeeeeeee". Now, when I press the power switch, the whining turns into a weird old-sci-fi like noise, like a "wheiblbleeibbdodod"... It's even fainter than the original whining.What's even stranger is that the standby seems to be working. The mainboard turns all it's leds on, and even the BIOS recovery (the board is an ASUS Maximus V Gene, it can flash the BIOS from a usb drive without booting) works.It's really a shame, because I cannot return it. I don't live in the US...----------//----------ORIGINAL REVIEWI can't measure the performance of the power supply. So, this review is about what the product seems to be.Looks good, it's really well built. It's powering a Core i5 3570K at 4.2GHz, with a lightly overclocked Radeon HD7950.No problems so far.While the fact that the fan only starts to spin at a factory-set threshold may be good for those who want absolute silence, I don't like it so much. The PSU used to stay (lightly) warm all the time.So, I opened it and connected the fan cable to one of the headers on the mainboard. Now, the fan spins all the time, and the PSU is always cool - even under load. Noise is not a problem - the fan is very silent. Seems very good to - it's sturdier and heavier than most other fans I've used on my computers.Comes with a lot of unnecessary stuff - even a kind of bag/pouch. I would prefer a lower price without these extra goodies, but well...for what it offers, I think this unit is very, VERY reasonably priced.