Cooler Master has been making fans, cases, heatsinks, and power supplies for almost two decades and if your working on PCs your bound to find their equipment out there. Today we have a new and unique product from them, the UCP 900W power supply.

The UCP 900W is unique because it is the first power supply on the market to obtain an 80Plus Silver power certification which is above the normal 80Plus power requirement. The power supply obtained efficiency ratings of 88% in tests although other power supplies have hit that level this is the first to have that official certification.

The box the PSU ships in is Apple like in it's simplicity although in a darker color. The PSU is pictured on front with a "5 year warranty" brightly labeled and on the back the specs are listed as well as some of the features of the PSU. The PSU is packaged well within box in Styrofoam. Inside the box is a power cable, warranty card, and screws for the power supply.

Taking the power supply out of the box you can feel that it is made out of very solid material. It is fairly heavy for a PSU and also a little longer at 150 x190 x 86mm. The power supply has a unique textured feel to it using a surface that isn't very reflective and doesn't pick up smudges. "ULTIMATE" is branded in large white letters on one side and "UCP-900W" with voltage specifications on the other.

The PSU is also one of the first of their new brand of UCP power supplies. UCP stands for Ultimate Circuit Protection. The PSU features some layout changes and gets the better effeciency through synchornized PFC 12v switching design, dual-VRM circuit boards for maximized 12v conversion to 5v and 3.3v and a new design of the circuit board layout. To quote Cooler Master, "The UCP series is meant for powering high-end system setups with circuit protection in mind to prolong the life-time of the power supply. Features that enable this include: soft-start circuitry to limit in-rush currents (a Cooler Master unique feature), the usage of quality components such as solid capacitors and intelligent fan control.

The included power cord is not your standard power plug. It's a little more expensive IEC 320 C19/C20 power cord so if you lose yours you'll need to seek out a different type of replacement. These are more common place on servers and should allow for more power draw if needed though we doubt most users will come close.

The UCP 900W features a massive amounts of cable options. A standard 24-pin ATX connector is included, two CPU 4+4 pins for workstation boards, two PCI-E 8 pin connectors, four PCI-E six pin connectors, five molex connectors, 9 SATA power cables, and one floppy rounding things out. The case is not modular although this might have been done because of the potential to hurt efficiency.

Here are the specs:

Model RS-900-AAAA-A3
Type Intel ATX 12V V2.3 / SSI EPS 12V V2.92
Dimension (W / H / D) 150 x190 x 86 (mm)
Input Voltage 90~264V
Input Current 12A@115Vac / 6.3A@230Vac
Input Frequency Range 47~63Hz
PFC ＞0.9
Power Good Signal 100~500ms
Hold Up Time >17ms
Efficiency >88%
MTBF >100,000hrs
Protection OVP / OCP / OPP / SCP / UVP / OTP
Output Capacity 900W
Max. Output Capacity 1080W
Regulatory NEMKO / TUV / CE / GOST / C-tick / UL / FCC
Fan 120mm Fan
Certification SLI / 80 Plus
Connector M/B 24 Pin Connector x 1
CPU 4+4 Pin x 2
PCI-E 8 Pin x2
PCI-E 6 Pin x4
Peripheral x 5
SATA x 9
Floppy x 1

Our test system was Windows Vista Home Ultimate 32-bit with SP1.

For idle we left the system sitting idle at the Windows desktop for 3 minutes and measured and for total system load we used 3DMark Vantage to push the system.

The Cooler Master UCP 900W beats all power supplies we tested for power usage including one of Antec's better PSUs. Not a world of difference but a difference.