Gigabyte has four new Aorus Elite series power supplies available, supporting the ATX 3.0 and PCIe 5.0 standards, with 80 Plus Platinum efficiency certification. The new fully modular power supplies are 850W and 1000W, clearly intending to compete with the best power supplies currently available. The two capacities come in either white or black trim for the casing and matching flat cables, so users can match the color scheme of their PC builds (provided the color is one of those two options).
These power supplies include all the standard power protection circuits like OCP, OTP, OVP, UVP, and SCP — protecting the hardware from over current, over and under voltage, over temperature, over power, and short circuit. The power supplies are designed to be compact for the power output, and are only 140mm deep ATX form factor PSUs. Cooled comes via a 120mm fluid dynamic bearing fan.
Aorus also includes a magnetic plate that can be swapped to either side of the power supply, depending on the unit's orientation. That can be helpful if you want to be able to see the name and specs, as not all cases are the same.
Perhaps more importantly, Gigabyte provides a 10-year warranty on these new PSUs, at least for the U.S. and many other regions — some areas may have an adjusted warranty length. But that's an area where warranty on paper and actual support may differ.
In the past year, Gigabyte PSUs were in the headlines for all the wrong reasons, and public perception took a big hit due to the Gigabyte GP-P850GM and GP-P750GM exploding units. Our power supply reviewer tested the 750W variant, and was able to cause a catastrophic failure. Gigabyte did partially address the issue by adjusting the OPP protection threshold, but initially didn't acknowledge or address issues relating to Dead-On-Arrival and failing units that customers were experiencing.
Now, Gigabyte and by extension Aorus power supplies face an uphill battle. Even though the failures were limited to certain models, the handling of reported problems should have been much better. When issues are not handled properly, users tend to avoid products from the company in the future, even if they're good options.
Other power supply companies have provided better responses, like EVGA, FSP, Cooler Master, Corsair and Seasonic who provided a stop-gap solution for the controversial 12VHPWR standard. No company is invulnerable from producing the occasional lemon, but providing bad service after the fact can truly damage a reputation that took decades to build.
While these new PSUs look good on paper, with an 80 Plus Platinum efficiency rating, that's not the deepest standard and doesn't inherently guarantee any specific level of quality. We'll have to see how the new units are priced and how they perform once independent reviews start showing up.
