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Gigabyte Odin GT 800W power supply unit

The Father of the Norse Gods sends a new PSU...

UK Exclusive Review Manufacturers love to cram extra features into every part of a PC, but it comes as a surprise that Gigabyte - making its debut in the PSU biz - has managed the same trick with its new Odin GT 800W power supply.

Gigabyte Odin GT 800W

Gigabyte has borrowed some aspects of the Odin from other high-end PSUs, so the casing is heavily perforated to aid cooling and the massive 140mm fan is the largest that would fit in the casing.

The cables are modular, using a system that Gigabyte calls Smart Cable Management and this is where we come across Odin's first oddity. There are four attached cables with the first supplying a 24-pin ATX connector.

The second carries both four-pin and eight-pin 12V connectors while the third and fourth are PCI Express power lines for graphics cards. These are branched to provide a two-pin connector alongside the regular six-pin plug so if you connect both in together they can power the new eight-pin connector that you find on AMD's ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT.

Curiously there are no native connectors for optical drives or hard drives so no matter what, you're sure to have to plug in at least one of the ancillary cables. There are six female connectors on the power supply. Two are colour-coded red and blue and are intended for the extra two PCIe graphics power cords. So yes, that's four PCIe connectors in total. Hello, HD 2900 XT CrossFire.

The other four cables each have three connectors, and if you plug the whole lot in you can run six SATA drives, five devices with Molex connectors and a single floppy drive. Annoyingly the latches for the connectors can block one another so you may have to unplug a couple of the cables if you decide to rearrange the cabling inside your PC.

So far, so normal, but then we come to the second oddity: the USB connection. You can either plug the connection directly to a spare USB header on your motherboard or you can connect a supplied adapter that feeds the cable out of the case to connect to an external USB port.

And why, you might wonder, would you want a data connection between your PC and your power supply? The Odin monitors both power draw and internal temperatures, much like the Bios monitors your motherboard, and the USB connection allows the Odin to pass this information to the Gigabyte Power Tuner software. That's a neat trick in itself but Gigabyte has extended the idea by adding four more connections to the power supply, all of which accept plug-in temperature probes that are 50cm long.

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