MGE XG Vigor 500 Watt Power Supply Review

The MGE XG Vigor 500 Watt Power Supply will definitely catch your eye with the highly polished chrome case the shiny 120mm wire fan guard only add to overall beauty of the exterior of the unit. You will also notice immediately that this is not some cheap nickel/dime power supply either, the pure weight of the unit lets you know that it has to have a fairly large transformer and heatsinks in it for it weight in like it does.

Looking at the front of the Vigor 500 we can see that MGE decided to use a far better cooling method for the power supply case than the standard slot cut case that we see in so many cheap power supplies these days. What they have done is use a series of tightly punched holes that cover the entire front of the power supply, leaving enough material to still maintain a rigid piece of material but with enough openings to allow large amounts of air to pass through with minimal resistance.

We mentioned the 120mm fan at the beginning of the review but what we didn't mention was the fan used happens to be nice blue LED fan which should do a very nice job of removing the heat from our case. Tests have shown that your average 120mm fan can produce 40 CFM @ 1500 RPM whereas a power supply that depends on a single 80mm fan to cool the power supply can only generate about 20 CFM @ 2400 RPM. So as you can see the choice of the 120mm fan is the perfect for this power supply.

MGE doesn't stop with the 120mm fan for cooling the Vigor 500 either, they have also added 80mm fan to the front of the Vigor 500. It should be noted that some companies use just a single 120mm fan to cool their power supplies, so MGE has really gone that extra mile to insure that the Vigor 500 stays nice and chilly during all periods of operation.

Now we did say the fans were variable speed, so you will need some way to adjust the speed of the fans and MGE has made sure you have precise control over how fast and how loud as well as how bright you want these fans to be. Mounted on the front of the power supply is a single 3/4 turn potentiometer that will allow you to adjust the speed and brightness of both fans from 1500 to 3500 RPMs.

Now here is something that I thought was rather cool, MGE has taken the the top cover of the Vigor 500 and modded a 4" X 2" opening on each side of the cover. They then used epoxy to mount two blue acrylic windows to the inside of the cover so that when power is applied the inside of the power supply lights up a nice shiny blue color for all to see. It's a very nice touch and looks very cool as you will see shortly.

Here you can see the current specification per rail for the Vigor 500, they are about what you would expect from your typical 500 watt power supply with one exception. The current rating of 17A on the +12A line seems to be slightly low compared to a number of other 500 watt supplies we checked but what will really be the true test is whether the voltage can stand up under a load and maintain a tight number when subjected to a series of stress tests over a period of time. So let's get on with it and find out.

Voltage/Current Specifications
+3.3V	+5V	+12	-12	+5Vsb	-12V
15.0A	40.0A	17.0A	0.6A	2.0A	0.8A
220 Watts Max