InWin Commander 1200W

A power supply whose aesthetics match its power, the InWin Commander is a solid product for enthusiasts who need the extra power for their rigs.

Introduction

Though most people believe that any generic power supply will do for their computer, this is not generally true. Strong systems require a lot of power, and this is where the InWin Commander comes into play. It is a well designed power supply, and its appearance is only matched by it’s performance.

ABOUT InWIN

IN-WIN Development Inc., an ISO 9001 manufacturer of professional computer chassis, power supplies and digital storage devices, is the leading provider of enclosure solutions to system integrators worldwide. Founded in 1986, IN-WIN provides high quality chassis that conform to all safety regulations, as well as unsurpassed customer service.

In Win was well trained to become a top-notch manufacturer of core technology to enhance internal core competence to meet what customer and market needs constantly. Top Management has been executed four major elements to reach our growing goal: Innovation, Service, Speed, Value, Safety, Warmth, Faithful, Diligence in order to remain our leading edge position and differentiate with other players.

IN WIN’S GOALS

• Your partner of choice
• Product quality assured
• Constant product innovation
• High environmental standards & social responsibilities
• Continuing the highest demands of service

The woodland style camouflage on the box brings to mind the military, and the strength and quality of the products they use.

On the side panel of the box, InWin lists all of the features that are bundled in with this power supply.

The bottom of the box goes into further detail and showcases all of the features and specifications of this power supply.

When we opened the box, we were highly impressed with the quality of packaging. The entire power supply was cased in styrofoam, and had no chance of moving out of its position. The package also include a few extras, including a bag for holding spare cables, the instruction manual, and the cables themselves.

The side of the power supply is well designed, and gives it an air of power.

The power supply also comes with a diagram explaining all the modular inputs and outputs.

Testing Methodology

The OS we use to test the PSU was Windows 7 Ultimate with all patches and updates applied. We also use the latest drivers available for the motherboard and any devices attached to the computer. We don’t disable a bunch of background tasks or particularly tweak the OS or system for bigger numbers. We do turn off drive indexing and daily defragging. We also turn off Prefetch and Superfetch. This is not an attempt to produce bigger benchmark numbers. Drive indexing and defragging can interfere with testing in that one test might occur without defragging going on and the next test defragging might be active, the same thing goes for drive indexing. We can’t control when defragging and indexing occur precisely enough to guarantee that they won’t interfere with testing, so we turn them off.

Prefetch tries to predict what you will load the next time you boot the machine. We disable it because we want to know how the program runs without any of the files being cached, otherwise each test run we’d have to clear pre-fetch to get accurate numbers. Lastly we disable Superfetch, since Superfetch loads often used programs into memory and is one of the reasons people consider Vista to be such a memory hog. Vista fills the memory in an attempt to predict what you will load. Having one test run with files cached, and another test run with the files being un-cached would result in skewed numbers. Again since we can’t control it we turn it off. Other than those 4 things which can potentially interfere with benchmarking, and do so out of our control, we leave everything else running.

For the tests we used 3DMark Vantage to achieve a game like experience, which should lead to the maximum load possible. For the idle tests we manually turned the PSU on with nothing attached to it. A Kill-A-Watt watt meter was used to measure the wattage being drawn by the computer from the wall socket. A Craftsman digital multimeter was used to measure the voltages on the connector to ensure that the most accurate result were obtained. To get the idle Power Factor Correction, we ran the PSU with the minimal components.

The current ATX 2.2 specifications allow for the following variation in voltage outputs:

• 3.3 Volt Rail:   3.135 – 3.465V
• 5 Volt Rail:      4.75V – 5.25V
• 12 Volt Rail:   11.4V – 12.6V

RESULTS

We were impressed with the results from the InWin Commander.

Conclusion

The InWin Commander lived up to our initial expectations and performed very well. It was an extremely well put together and well thought out product. We would recommend the product to enthusiasts who need a high amount of power.