ePower Tagan 480W

Examination:

With the sheer number of power supplies on the market, it can be difficult to find a sleek yet elegant power supply that simply isn’t erected with multiple LED fans and acrylic windows. However, we must say the ePower Tagan was quite attractive with its simple but rich appearance. The entire power supply is colored black and has a nice finish to it, reminding us of the recently reviewed Seasonic S12. It was interesting to see ePower go back to the plain black design as the two latest ePower PSU’s we had reviewed (Xscale and Xmicro) both possessed a mirror-like finish. On the rear of the power supply, is a standard 80mm fan also accompanied with the 115/230 VAC connector, and on/off switch. On the Tagan, there is a small flexible plastic cover ontop of the power switch. This cover isn’t commonly seen among many consumer grade PSUs, but is useful for safety purposes. On the sides, top, and bottom of the power supply, the surface remains almost untouched of any extra items except for on one of the sides where there is a small sticker containing electrical information for the Tagan.

Removing the top off the Tagan, we see the insides of the PSU to be well constructed and two fairly large heatsinks are used inside of the power supply for cooling purposes.

Unfortunately with the cables, none of them were sleeved (except for the main power connector) but all of the cables were luckily twisted. Although twisted cables don’t have the same winning appearance of sleeve cables, at least the cable management is improved with twisted wires. The main power connector simply uses small black netting for sleeving the cable but unfortunately, the material easily frays. With the ePower Tagan TG-480-U01 it was interesting to see that the 20+4 sliding connector wasn’t used. Instead, the main connector was simply a standard 24-pin connector. The same went for the P4 power connector, there was an individual power cable for the 4-pin connector and a separate one for the 8-pin connector, ePower’s sliding connector technology wasn’t adopted by this PSU. The other connectors found on this power supply were two Serial ATA, ten molex, and two FDD power connectors. Another rare feature found on the ePower Tagan is the use of an extra thick RTN grounding connector cable. The RTN grounding cable should be fixed to one of the screw-holes on your motherboard. This cable is used as the DC output by-pass current ground loop, but also serves to reduce the ripple/noise and increasing the system stability. All cables were of reasonable length and shouldn’t have any conflicts even in full ATX systems.