It doesn't feel like Christmas when you open a power-supply, you get a kettle lead, 4 screws and the unit itself - that's it,, no handy accessories or useless gizmos here

At around £35, I am going to put this unit in the budget department, but it is not unheard of for cheap PSU to surprise, so I am still going to give this PSU a fair trial.

Time for some practicalities- we've got a nice shiny glossy black PSU out the box now. You can either call is plain or elegant, the choice is yours, either way it's fairly nondescript save for a golden wire grill on it's 120mm cooling fan. The back vent has a large, but simple square tile cut out, which makes a change from the popular honeycomb patterns you see on many PSUs now. My initial reaction is, I like the switch on it. It's small, but very solid, it's either on or off, there's no sogginess here, no half clicks to crackling almost-ons, it's got a nice big click to it.

Raptoxx have also mounted it vertically next to the  power input, which is a welcome change to many power supplies, where manufacturers insist on putting the switch horizontally under the power  input, where it's hardest to reach from the front of the computer.

It's also worth noting that the unit is nice and short, only 140mm, and there are no vents on the back, which leaves a nice tidy space for a bundle of unused cables in most cases.

Some PSU’s like a big size for airflow and such, but this one will definatly be friendly to mATX cases, or some recent cases that only give the bare minimum.

I have to say I was a little disappointed with the cables. With many PSUs coming pre-braided or at least with nice plugs on them, it seems very generic for a modder's power-supply to be so bare and plain.

Of course you could argue that it gives the consumer space to do his own modding, as many agree there's too much pre-modded stuff on the market but I am not going to argue that though, because it's not braided to keep the price down. The ATX lead has a short braiding on it, but as you can see, it doesn't get anywhere near the plug, which ruins the effect somewhat.

On the other hand, to save confusion, the ATX plug is one of those split jobs. If you look carefully, the extra 4 pins on the end can be removed, allowing you to plug the lead into older generation motherboards without difficulty or space consuming converter leads.

It concerns me that there's only 5 Molex connectors as well, for me that's not a problem, as I only have two drives in my computer, but there are some crazy folks out there with many hard drives and many cold cathodes. I'm thinking they might run into trouble. Even with sparse plugs however, the Molex cables are an easy 75cm length, which should reach deep into big Chieftec depths, or in the average case, provide enough slack to tuck them away out of sight without stretching or straining wires.

The twin SATA plugs make up for this though, being on their own cable, and the mid one being a 90 degree connecter makes for a very tidy hard drive set up with no need for splitters or converters.

Let's have a look inside.

The top cover comes off completely, which is useful as several PSU’s I've opened up have inductor coils attached to the lid, these can't be disconnected and make things awkward. I'm not blown away by quality yet,  an ADDA fan is fairly bog standard in unbranded PSU’s, but seeing as it's thermally controlled, it probably won't matter that much.

I tell you what, there is not much there is there? That ADDA fan will not have trouble here. I am willing to bet that with such a small unit to cool, this thing will probably be xtremely quiet.

However, as we move on to testing, I will let you in to my early thoughts: Alarm bells are ringing faintly now. Firstly, I do not know if you've noticed, but the 12v rails are only 10 and 15 amps, which is a tad low for a 450w PSU. Despite the wattage, the real power is current, and if the current is low, you can have all the watts you want, but it is still going to under power your computer. Equivalent power supplies are often at 18 and 20 amps. This is becoming apparent when we look inside the unit too, although looks can be deceiving, let us face it, there really is not much in this thing. All that being said and I have not even switched it on yet. So now we will find out if it really goes or not, st £35 ($50) I am expecting this to do its job, but I'll respect it as a budget PSU.

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