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Housed in a gold aluminium chassis the second PSU from Coolergiant looks very impressive if a little tacky. It’s also available in a shiny red finish. Many of the Noisetaker features have been inherited by the Coolergiant range, with a few additions and several improvements.

The EG485AX-VHB(G) is rated at 480W, which is towards the top end of the consumer market, but it is not the most powerful PSU on test. Interestingly, the EG485AX-VHB(G) has three fans, one in the back, one in the front and a third blower fan in the bottom. This blower fan is branded from Sanyo Denki so should be high quality, has a dedicated exhaust at the back and is designed to keep your CPU cool rather than the PSU. It can be adjusted via the dial on the back of the PSU and can get quite loud, especially in combination with the other two fans.

There’s plenty of wiring on the EG485AX-VHB(G) and unless you’re going to use it for a server we can’t see anyone running out of cables here. There are no less than seven Molex connectors and two floppy drive connectors as well as four SATA power connectors. This is also one of only two PSUs on test with a six pin connector for PCI Express graphics cards to be hard wired in to the PSU. As with the Noisetaker, there’s a header for measuring the PSU’s fan speeds. Finally there’s a 24-pin EPS style power connector and a four pin 12V connector. The braiding is much better on this PSU than on the Noisetaker unit, although it could go further up on a lot of the cables.

Coolergiant also supplies a 24 to 20-pin adaptor in case your motherboard doesn’t have a 24-pin connector and an extra SATA power splitter that gives you a further two SATA power connectors. Interestingly there is also a ferrite shielding fitted around all of the power cables where they enter the PSU casing, which we haven’t seen on any other PSUs.

Sadly the Coolergiant is plagued by the same problems as the Noisetaker, as it couldn’t cope with a 100 per cent load on the 12V rails, which is a real disappointment as it otherwise performed well in all of the tests. It also had a tendency to produce a whining noise from the fans and the higher the load, the more annoying the noise. Hopefully these are issues that Coolergiant/Enermax will resolve, but before this has been done there is no way we can recommend this PSU.

Manufacturer	Coolergiant/Enermax
Model	Coolergiant EG485AX-VHB(G)
URL	http://www.coolergiant.co.uk
Supplier	Scan
URL	http://www.scan.co.uk
Price	£66.52
Molex connectors	7
Floppy connectors	2
SATA connectors	4
20-pin ATX / 24-pin EPS	Y/Y
12V connector	Y
AUX connector	N
Six pin PCI Express connector	Y
Deditacted Molex for graphics	N
Fan speed header	Y
Other connectors	N/A
Fans and size	2x 80mm & 1x blower fan
Extras included	24-pin to 20-pin adapter, 2x SATA power adapter
Max power output (manufacturers rating)
3.3V	34A
5V	40A
12V	16A + 15A
Total power	480W

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