Cooler Master V850 SFX Gold Power Supply Review

While the V850 SFX might be small it does come packed with some really great features and the most notable is the cooling system.  Here you will find a single 92mm fluid dynamic bearing fan that operates in a 15% semi fanless mode.  When the PSU is operating below 15% load the fan will remain idle.  Any load beyond 15% then the fan will spin up to keep the PSU cool.

Based on my extensive testing I figured out that under an extreme load the PSU temperature never spiked above 30c and when left to idle below the 15% threshold the PSU temperature never spiked beyond the loaded temperature proving that the gold rated efficiency was working, at least from a temperature standpoint.

The PSU is a single rail design and comes with the standard six bolt mounting system.  The four outer screws will work for most installations but there are a few which require the center two screw holes.  These are part of the SFX standard so you’ll find them on every version.

I am happy to see that Cooler Master included a master power switch and while it is smaller than the ATX version it works just the same.

A fully modular PSU indicates that every cable can be physically removed from the PSU.  This can really help when it comes to building a PC and cable management.  Simply remove the cables you aren’t using to make running the required cables a breeze.  Of course, if you happen to upgrade your build and need another cable, pull it out of storage and away you go.

An important thing to note is that cables from modular power supplies are not universal and the cables for the CM V850 SFX Gold may not work on other Cooler Master power supplies or PSUs from other manufacturers.  When upgrading it is best to consult the documentation before mixing and matching cable sets. 

As you can see here the modular plug layout is following an older CM standard with a split 24-pin main cable and 5-pin rows for the Molex and SATA plugs.   Cables in this configuration are usually interchangeable.  This is great news for those of you using custom sleeved cable sets.

SFX Power supplies are generally designed for SFF (Small Form Factor) builds where space is a premium.  Because of this the cables that come with the V850 SFX are a little shorter when compared to the ATX versions.

You will get the following cables
1x 24-pin Main Power Cable
2x 8-pin CPU Power Cables
2x Dual 6+2-pin PCI Express Power Cables
2x SATA Power Cables with 4 Plugs per cable
1x MOLEX Power Cable with 4 Plugs per cable

Given that these cables follow the Cooler Master modular configuration you can swap these out for longer versions or if your particular build requires a different CPU or PCI Express power configuration you can mix and match as needed.