Chieftec Polaris 850W Power Supply Review

Efficiency

Given that the Polaris is officially an 80-Plus Gold Efficiency rated power supply, this was quite a high bar set by Chieftec. After all, better efficiency means that less of the power coming out of your plug socket doesn’t end up being lost or wasted. So, with this in mind, how did it do?

Well, as can be seen in the charts below, the Chieftec Polaris easily manages to warranty that 80-Plus Gold rating and does so by a pretty strong margin. Although not quite hitting the heights of anything better, we can say for certain that it is among the ‘Gold’ rating, with it never dropping below 90% efficiency, this is definitely among the top-tier of that category.

PFC (Power Factor Correction)

Although starting quite low, which is entirely to be expected of practically all power supply models, once you start asking the Chieftec Polaris to work harder, the PFC quickly ramps up to impressively high levels. Achieving around 0.97 at 100% load is exactly what you want to see and, put simply, this result would suggest that the more you ask of this power supply, the more it delivers.

Voltage Regulation

Although there was a little deviancy among the 12V and -12V rails, once everything averaged out, the results provided in our test are certainly more than acceptable. We wouldn’t go as far as to say that these specific results are amazing (because honestly, they’re not), but at the same time, we saw absolutely nothing in them to warrant concern.

A definitely item of note though undoubtedly is seen in how amazing consistent the results were from the other rails with absolutely minimal levels of deviancy seen.