Photos and Features

The exterior of the XTR has a rough black finish like most other power supplies. On both sides there is a large silver XTR logo with a little aged look to them. The logo is flipped on one side so no matter how you have the power supply installed it will show properly, a nice touch! Up on top there is another aged XTR logo as well as the power supplies 650 wattage rating in a large font. Also on the top of the XTR is the power breakdown of how much wattage each rail handles.

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The view from the outside of the case gives us a peak at the power connection and power switch. Above both is a small XFX XTR logo to give people a peak at what is powering your system when looking from the outside of your case (not counting peaking in a side panel window of course)

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For cooling XFX went with a 135mm fan but what really sets it apart is the hexagon shaped fan grill. The grill really gives the power supply a little style without using bright colors or lighting to get your attention. In the middle of the fan is the XFX logo. It’s really a shame that in most situations the fan grill will be facing the bottom of the case and not visible.

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Beyond the XTRs unique styling, one of the biggest features that it has to help it stand out from a crowd is it fan mode switch. The switch itself is just a small switch on that inside of your case on the same side of the power supply as its modular cable connections. What it does is what is important though. When you flip the switch up it turns on what XFX calls their Hybrid Fan Technology. Normally under low power loads (20% load or 25 degrees Celsius) a power supply fan will turn down, with Hybrid Fan Technology turned on the fan in the XTR will actually turn all the way off. This saves you a tiny bit more electricity in those situations but more importantly it will cut noise down even more.

My initial though was why would you even need a switch for this, why not just run this all of the time. But after thinking about it, I am glad that XFX gave us the option. You see, in some small cases their might only be one case fan. In those situations the power supply fan sometimes pulls double duty by helping with case air flow as well. If you ran hybrid mode in a case like that you do risk things heating up when the fan shuts off. Having explained all of that, in most situations I think you should keep this mode turned on. The lower power usage, silent operation, and even extending the life of the fan are all good reasons to stick with it.

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In a lot of situations when someone says they have a modular power supply, the chances of it actually being FULL modular are very slim. Technically most power supplies are actually only partial modular. That means that their 24 pin and 8 pin CPU cables are typically hard wired while the rest of the cabling is modular. Most manufactures do this to save money because let’s be honest how often are you going to not need to use the 24 pin power cable. As it turns out there are a few situations where this does come in handy, I ran into a few of them on our project build “Fridge” a while back. In that build we went completely crazy with every aspect of the build including the power supplies. We went with two 1200 watt power supplies to power the 4 XFX HD 7970’s alongside of the dual 8 core CPUs. Having full modular power supplies worked out really well in this situation. When running two power supplies its nice to not have to hide the second 24 pin cable that won’t be needed. On top of that having full modular cables makes it easier to redo the sleeving to customize your PC.

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All of the cables other than the 24 pin cable use a thin and flexible wire design that makes routing cables behind the motherboard tray easy, even on tight PCs. For cables you get the one 24 pin motherboard cable as well as two 8 pin CPU cables. One of the CPU cables is a full 8 pin while the other is a 4+4 design that will work with PCs that require a 4 pin or 8 pin connections. For peripheral cables you get three SATA power cables and two Molex style power cables. This will give you a maximum of 10 SATA connections and 6 Molex. XFX also slipped in a floppy power connection, on the off chance anyone still uses a floppy disc drive. For PCI cables you get two, each has two 6+2 connections each, I love the double plug design because you end up with fewer cables to route when hooking up video cards with two connections.

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garfi3ld replied the topic: #34197 26 Feb 2014 19:00
Happy Hump Day

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