Introduction

When it comes to quality ATX power supplies, consumers have never had a better selection or more options to choose from. Just 20 years ago in the early 2000s, good power supplies were few and far apart. A lot of cheap cases came with even cheaper bundled power supplies, you were lucky if your 450+ watt power supply could actually deliver its rated measly 300 W on the +12 V rail (spoiler alert – most times they couldn’t).

The 80 Plus program really helped in addressing those issues. If a PSU was 80 Plus rated, you not only knew that it was meeting a certain set of criteria for efficiency, but that it in fact could deliver its full output under testing conditions. In the mid-to-late 2000s we also saw higher and higher power requirements for GPUs and, to some extent, for CPUs as well. This put emphasis on delivering more power on the +12 V rail. Alongside better conversion efficiency via step down DC-DC circuits, this rail became the focus of the current day power supply – a unit that can deliver all of its power on the +12 V rail, while stepping down to power the minor rails, which over time saw a reduction in their importance.

The single-rail power supply market in the form of laptops, mini PCs and some ITX motherboards has also been growing for the past decade. A couple of years ago it first came to the desktop PC space as well – in the form of the ATX12VO standard. ATX12VO power supplies only output +12V and +12Vsb voltages, using the 10 pin ATX12VO connector instead of the beloved 24 pin ATX connector to deliver power for the these rails as well as the PS ON signal.

This leads us to today’s sample – the 1200 W rated PlatiGemini from Enermax. As you might have guessed it already, it complies with the ATX12VO standard. But in addition to that, it is also fully compatible with the classical ATX (version 3.1 I might add) standard (hence – Gemini in the name), making it indeed very universal. According to Enermax, the PlatiGemini 1200 W (currently the only wattage available for the series) is the world’s first power supply in compliance with both standards.

Today we’ll see how well it performs. But let’s start with the specification summary.

Specifications

As this is also an ATX12VO power supply, the vendor provides a second power output table when operating in ATX12VO as well: