I’ll be honest, before being given the option to review the Vortec PSU I’d never heard of MGE Company (XG – Extreme Gamer) so was a little sceptical as I headed to their website… what I wasn’t expecting was a product catalogue of such cool looking components as the Vortec PSU and the Dragon/Viper cases. You can’t help but be impressed, So with great anticipation I accepted the Vortec 500w PSU as a review item and waited for it to arrive…

Packaging:

The Vortec comes in a sturdy cardboard box which displays all of the important features of the PSU. Two useful features of the box (yes boxes can have useful features!!) are the handle on the top to assist in carrying and the window on the side so that you can see a little of how pretty the PSU is…

The Bundle:

The Vortec comes with the expected components, a power lead, manual and converter for ATX>BTX. For those of you who don’t know what that is, some new motherboards require 24 pin power connectors where as the last few generations of boards have been 20 pin. The converter supplied by MGE/XG allows you to use either.

We had a quick flick through the manual and it contains all of the information you need on the unit. Including a bit of background on MGE/XG, detailed warranty repair instructions/conditions and troubleshooting. It’s well laid out and simple to follow.

The PSU:

The Vortec 500w is a nice looking beast, the casing is aluminium and painted a lovely blue. On the side of the unit you can see the side window which gives you a glimpse of the inner components including a blue light up fan.

The top (or bottom depending on how you hold the unit) features a large fan grill with the Vortec logo which covers the internal 120mm fan.

Finally on the main unit we have the rear of the PSU. As you would expect there is an exhaust fan and power switch (both light up) as well as a chrome fan speed knob. The fan speed knob is a nice addition to the PSU, especially if you want to build an ultra silent system.

Cabling is plentiful on the Vortec, as mentioned above the unit comes with a conector so that you can use 20 or 24 pin motherboards. The Unit is also sata ready no any converters needed for your sata drive. PCI Express power connectors are not yet included though. The blue nylon sleeving on the wires is a nice touch and makes the whole system look much tidier than traditional supplies.

We’ve seen a few design updates on Molex plugs recently to make removing them from devices easier, MGE/XG’s design is one of the best, you can see from the picture below that the Molex features ridged additions which give a better grip of the plug.

Inside the unit the components are well spaced out and therefore are well cooled by the internal fans, no complaints on this front. We did make the observation earlier in the article that the Vortec is slightly longer than most PSU’s, in the pic below you can see that there is a large area of empty space within the unit, not necessarily a bad thing as there will be plenty of airflow but a strange design decision really. (It could well make the Vortec an ideal unit for modding in some way, extra fans etc, if you so desire.

The specs of the unit are provided on the side and you can see the ratings below (this is the 500w model for those not paying attention).

Over voltage protection for this unit uses the latch-mode method and is defined as follows:

+12v output is between 14.0v and 17.0v
+5v output is between 5.8v and 6.3v
+3.3v output is between 3.6v and 4.2v

When testing a power supply such as this, it’s important to use a high end system with a top of the line processor along with many optical and hard drives. With this in mind we used the following test rig and worked the PSU hard for many hours under heavy loads.