I guess it's safe to say that a Kilowatt power supply is going to have some pretty impressive numbers attached to it, almost regardless of who makes it. But what I've glimpsed of the ePower 1000W so far, well, it really impresses me. Before we get to the numbers, looking at the features would seem to be keeping in order with things. What do we have to mull over here?

Power Protection Functions will protect all the voltage rails if a power spike should strike. If that imaginary power strike were to hit the ePower, the Power Protection Feature would shut down and wait for you to manually restart to power suplpy using the rear toggle switch.

Over-Current Protction can sense when the output voltage exceeds its maximum safe rating.

Over-Voltage protection for all three voltage rails consisting of the following:

Sorry, do these numbers seem a little confusing? Your not alone. Many people don't know what overvoltage protection is, despite its relative simplicity. Intelligent circuitry inside the power suply is constantly monitoring the voltage rails. If say the +12V rail were to surge to15V, the Over-Voltage Protection would kick in and prevent that particular rail from ever exceeding 17V, as seen above. The ePower 1000W would rather shut down during an over voltage than toast your hard drive. But to induce an over voltage state, here has to be a big power surge flying through your house, which can be rare. Regardless, Over Volage Protection, it's agood thing.

Short-Circuit Protection  is there if ever should the DC outputs on the ePower 1000 watt supply fail due to fatigue or human wear and tear through human error, the power will shut iself down.

Active PFC (Power Factor Correction) allows a power supply to regulate the amount of incoming current more efficiently. If your system is running at idle, then only the power that's needed to idle will be drawn from your wall socket. When a system is at load, the PFC will adjust itself to allow for more incoming current. PFC started in Europe because of the need to conserve electricity. It quickly caught on with the rest of the world and has been lowering the global electric bill ever since.

In fact, pretty much all of these features could be described as a high efficency, auto switching circuit breaker. All the descriptons may be a little much to digest, but it also goes to show how ePower has constructed a very safe, very reliable power supply.

So if your ready, here's some more numbers.

Incase that's not enough for you, a quick snap of the PSU side panel specifications label.

Now aren't those six +12V rails a beauty to behold. And with 900 Watts between all of them just begs for a RAID array and a zillion fans or so (okay, over zealous exaggeration on my part there). But the +12V rail is the most commonly used voltage on a modern system. Another nice figure is the +5VSB running at 6A. Voltage standby is required for every power supply, regardless. In the simplest of terms, that +5V at 6A is what lies behind the power button in a lifeless computer. But push that button, close that circuit, and a quck blast of +5V at 6A runs through all the power connectors and the mother board to say "Wake Up!".

It's enough to jolt the system to life and start the boot sequence. But if the Amperage behind the +5V standby power was too low, say only 2A, then your PC parts wouldn't have enough power to bring them to life. Stand-By Voltage or VSB, very important for higher end systems.