Fractal ION 550 & 850 watt Power Supply Review

Fractal Design is powering up their product line with several new 80 Plus Gold rated ATX sized power supplies ranging in capacity from 550w to 850w. Fractal states that these new units support the latest ATX 2.52 standard on improving their startup time, and fast transient load response.

It all looks like they’re bringing the same attention to detail, design style and high quality assembly that I am familiar with in their cases to the world of power supplies. Good, because in addition to all that, I really like their documentation – no seriously – their guides and docs are usually quite good.

On with the powering!

What’s In the box

That fine manual of course, Fractal branded cable ties and mounting screws, which is nice because you don’t always get those with the PSU. See the images for examples of information included in the manual, they certainly are under no obligation to include pin outs and wiring plot, but they do. It’s just one of those manuals you don’t mind reading.

A full kit of wiring connections, cannot forget them naturally. Not the best looking some of them – especially the 24 pin which was a bit unbound near the ends. Otherwise, the gauge appears sufficient as even 14ga can carry up to 20amps. The number of different cables included was very nice. The 850 watt unit came with 2x 8 pin CPU cables (one split into a pair of 4×4), and 3 PCIe cable which themselves split down into pairs of 6+2 sets. The 550 watt unit came with one of each for comparison, which seems more realistic. The 850 is definitely set up to run many power hungry components.

And the reason why you opened the box of course, the fully modular power supply itself. 80PLUS Gold rated, 150mm deep and seemingly all metal. Even the round grate is made of metal bars. They come in 550, 650, 750 and 850 watt capacities and a 7 year warranty!

Fractal also mentions full electrical protection as part of their feature set, which is good considering the wiring mess I made on the test bench.

Fractal touts their over and under current protection, same with voltage and temperature protection circuits, which we would expect from a premium component manufacturer.

Externally

Between the two test units we have, I immediately noted that both output sides appear identical given they have the same number of connections. However, the wiring kits included with each won’t allow you use them all out of the box on the 550 at least.

The units themselves are attractive for PSUs, all metal and include a 140mm Fractal Designs long life sleeve bearing fan, with their notched blades helping to eliminate fan hum. Seemed to work, as it was very difficult to hear over everything else making noise on the test bench.

In fact, the fan speed and attendant noise levels are helpfully plotted out right here!

Testing and Observations

I love the eighties, so I used them as part of the scenario for our testing purposes. I mean a 1080, a 2080 and a 3080 – what did you think I meant? Thank goodness the Fractal PSUs provide so much voltage and current protection. Our scenario is to try and make the entire system draw power at somewhere near its peak. We’re going to run Cinebench R23 in a loop, and Unigine Superposition at 1080p Ultra to try and push the system. Oh, and that’s some good wiring down there, I think. Yeah.

Our test mule today is a 10700k in a Gigabyte Z490 Aorus Master with 32GB of Corsair 3200Mhz ram, with Profile 1 XMP engaged. All tests were run with a mild overclock on the 10700k of 200Mhz, so that it ran 4.9Ghz all core. No additional CPU voltage or current tuning was done in the BIOS.

CPU cooling was handled by a be quiet! 280mm AIO, turned sideways on our Thermaltake Core P3 test bench using some nice XSPC brackets. The cooler has to be turned, otherwise long cards cannot be fitted to the motherboard.

In turn the GPUs were also OC’d – we’re trying to bump up the PSU needs to amateur enthusiast levels here, right?

Using MSI Afterburner, mild overclocking was applied:
Nvidia reference GTX 1080 was boosted by 160Mhz core, 200Mhz memory
EVGA RTX 2080 OC was boosted by 90Mhz core, 450Mhz memory
MSI RTX 3080 Suprim was boosted by 100Mhz core, 250Mhz memory

We used a pair of Passmark PSU testers, wired inline to capture voltages and current draw. Inline wiring is used to pass the usage through the device in order to sample current flow and compute wattages more accurately. Two of them were necessary so that massive current using cards like the MSI Suprim with three 8 pin power plugs could be sampled.

A Note On the Passmarks

We are using these devices to sample power, not for their abilities to “fail” a PSU due to variances in slew rates or voltage ripple, as we have discovered there is some disagreement as to how those should be accurately measured. So we are not going to report on certain conditions that might at first appear to be reportable as an error, and we’ll stick closely to what we try and ascertain as factual measurements. We certainly know that this isn’t $50k of lab equipment, and we’re enthusiasts like you, trying to pass on what we experience and observe while applying a layer of experience over it. Onward.

Testing with the GTX 1080

Testing with the EVGA RTX 2080

Testing with the MSI RTX 3080 Suprim

Conclusion

I have to agree with Fractal, these are attractively priced power supplies that will get the job done. Under heavy load, I found the Ion 850 watt unit to be rather quiet, and I really did not get it warm to the touch. The fan kept it cool, but I was running open air, so I am sure that helped. Regardless, the cooling worked great. Something else I observed was power down after run, similar to when you take your turbo charged car out for a hot run and there’s a pump to continue to circulate the oil after you shut down – the Fractal Ion 850w kept running the fan after shutdown, even after I flipped the attached PSU switch to off. I nod in appreciation.

I did observe peaks higher then this, but it is important to note that many PSUs would be running a bit outside their efficiency zone at around 800w of their 850w capacity – that’s across all rails as a reminder. But if you take a look a the fan / efficiency curve earlier in this review, you can see that at about 90% load, the Fractal Ion 850w is still at about 88% or more efficiency. It was making that heavily loaded electronics sizzling noise – like very tiny bacon when you put your ear close – but no problem with running the computer flat out or cooling the PSU. That customized 140mm Fractal fan did spin up a bit though, but it was very hard to hear over the MSI coils. Heh.

The pricing on these power supply units are very competitive, I would encourage you to check them out based on my short experience so far. Longevity concerns should be eased by Fractals generous 7-year warranty on these Ion PSUs.