Gamdias Kratos P1-750W Gold ATX Power Supply Review

1. Introduction, Specifications, and Pricing
2. Packaging
3. Hardware & Documentation
4. Gamdias Kratos P1-750W ATX Power Supply
5. Real World Test System & Observations
6. Final Thoughts

TweakTown's Rating: 89%

The Bottom Line

Gamdias has partnered up well here, and the Kratos P1 750W Gold rated ARGB PSU is a clear sign of this.

Buy at Amazon

Introduction, Specifications, and Pricing

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Gamdias is a brand you likely do not even consider when thinking about a power supply for your new rig. Many of the well known or "top" names in the game, such as SilverStone, Seasonic, Corsair, Thermaltake, Super Flower, Antec, or Enermax/Eco Master, may come to mind. However, Gamdias, which is probably best known for its gaming peripherals as you can find reviews for in our massive database of gaming peripheral reviews. However, we do indeed have a PSU from Gamdias, or likely an OEM manufacturer builds this for Gamdias.

The Gamdias Kratos series of Power supplies seem to be a semi-modular option to service users who may not need or want the fully modular supply. The Kratos supplies have several of the main connectors which are hard-wired to the supply versus a fully modular supply. The Cables included on the supply and are not removable would be as follows:

• 24-pin main ATX connector
• 8-pin (4+4) CPU EPS connector
• 2x 8-pin (6+2) GPU power connectors pigtail
• ARGB connector for fan illumination (3-pin)

The rest of the cables are modular and can be added as needed for your build. Things such as peripheral/SATA cables along with another GPU pigtail.

Some of the key features Gamdias lists for the Kratos P1-750W are as follows:

• Meets 80 PLUS Gold Efficiency
• Semi-modular
• RGB Motherboard Sync
• Neon-Flex RGB 30 built-in lighting effects
• Addressable LEDs
• DC to DC design
• Silent Mode

Much of this is standard fare for a PSU; the ARGB fan is a unique addition, which many PSUs have not adopted. The inclusion will vary in value depending upon your installation and the visibility of the PSU in your build.

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The Kratos P1-750W power supply carries a part number of "Kratos P1-750G," which is excellent as it makes the model easy to remember should you like the styling and performance and want to pick up one of your own. The unit measures in at 140mm length, 150mm width, and 86mm height, I had to measure this myself as one thing Gamdias does not have going for it is a full spec sheet giving users an idea at a quick look if the PSU will fit in a potentially limited PSU chamber in a chassis.

The Kratos P1-750W Gold power supply is available from Amazon at the time of writing for $99.99, which, when looking at possible options, is not a horrible deal, as any competing similar wattage options are Bronze rated options. The options which are gold that we see in this range are around 500W up to 650W. There are some fully modular options, but they are sprinkled in at various wattages in that range, but semi-modular seems to be rather popular in the sub-$100 sector. Lets now move inside the package to see what the Kratos is all about, and prep for the performance testing part of our review.

Shannon's Power Supply Test System Specifications

• Motherboard: ASUS Zenith Extreme Alpha (buy from Amazon)
• CPU: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX (buy from Amazon)
• Cooler: Custom Alpha cool CPU Liquid Cooling (buy from Amazon)
• Memory: Corsair Vengeance RGB 3000MHz 32GB (buy from Amazon)
• Video Card: NVIDIA TITAN V (buy from Amazon)
• Video Card: NVIDIA TITAN Xp Collectors Edition (buy from Amazon)
• Video Card: NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti (buy from Amazon)
• Storage: SanDisk M.2 256GB
• Power Supply: GAMDIAS Kratos P1-750W Gold RGB Power Supply (buy from Amazon)
• OS: Microsoft Windows 10 Home 64-bit (buy from Amazon)

Packaging

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The front of the Kratos P1 packaging has a color representation of the PSU itself, showing the modular plugs along with the permanently attached black flat cables. They also use some artistic liberty here to accentuate the RGB of the fan, which is not quite as retina blasting as they show here. Gamdias wants to make sure you have every bit of information on hand when you look at it, so the front is covered in feature icons and RGB support from all the major motherboard players.

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Flipping the packaging 180 degrees and we have the rear, which once again makes a note of features via a triangular bullet list. They also use about 30% of the bottom left to show a color palette to ensure potential customers understand that you can adjust the color; however, you find necessary. Gamdias also lists all the connectors the Kratos P1 has available for use and a full output table. Below all of this is the inventory management barcodes and even a QR code, which leads to the user manual. Lastly, we have the company info across the lower portion and end with a full array of compliance and safety icons at the bottom.

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Flipping to one of the smaller sides of the package, we find a single feature highlighted, which is the silent mode switch. This switch optimizes the fan curve for quiet operation, but you sacrifice higher thermals of the PSU, which is a tradeoff you can make. The feature disabled will run the fan at a full-speed mode all of the time, and I must say, I'm not 100% sure how many people will opt for that as that can get quite noisy. This is usually the type of feature we see on overclocking designed power supplies where you want the fan running 100% for heavy loading and better stability; I don't see many pro overclockers opting for a Gamdias 750W during their OC adventures. I would much rather see Gamdias offer two fan curves with one being more aggressive and possibly a little more noise rather than silent or 100%

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Flipping the box to the small opposing side, we see another feature callout. This time being the RGB implementation and how to control it. The RGB has thirty preset modes, or if you depress the RGB button for three seconds. It then will toggle to motherboard sync mode, which will use the included 3-pin header to get its RGB signal from your motherboard or other compatible 3-pin ARGB controller.

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The main flap used for opening the packaging also has more RGB information, this time in ten languages, including English.

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Here we see the Kratos P1 750W in its box. One thing you notice is more value-oriented PSU's tend to omit the special compartmentalized packaging to avoid the extra cost as you see here. The accessories are simply placed next to the PSU with the unit itself wrapped in a bubble wrap bag to help avoid scuffs during shipping. This is not necessarily a bad thing; it merely means that they wanted to offer more value by cutting the fat from items such as bags for the cables and PSU that may just be tossed if not suitably repurposed. I'm ok with this sort of omission at this price point.

Hardware & Documentation

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The Kratos accessory pack is below:

• 4x PSU mounting screws
• 5x zip ties for cable management

As you can see, the accessory pack is quite scant, but I cannot fault them for this as it has everything needed to get the PSU in and running.

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The ancillary cables are up next and here are connectors and cables which are modular:

• 2x 8-pin (6+2) GPU power connectors pigtail
• 8x SATA connectors
• 3x 4-pin PATA (Molex) connectors
• 2x 4-pin FDD (Floppy) connectors
• Main AC input cable

I do like the Gamdias included a PATA 4-pin connector to each SATA power lead as the 4-pin PATA peripheral connector is a dying breed. This means if you need one, you do not need to install an entire string of them when SATA is gaining relevance as the connector of choice for many peripheral devices. I do, however, question the need for two FDD connectors as they are virtually unused these days.

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Here you can see the non-modular cable set, which comes permanently attached to the Kratos PSU. Most of these cables are necessary except for the dual GPU connectors, which may not be needed depending on the application, but then I would question why you are buying a 750W PSU, to begin with. Overall this is a pass for me because these connectors have always been needed in systems I have built. Except for the pigtail when a GPU may only have a single connector, but that's acceptable. Oh, and don't forget the RGB cable, which most will likely use to sync the PSU to their motherboard.

Gamdias Kratos P1-750W ATX Power Supply

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Looking first at the fan grille side of the PSU and we can see that Gamdias took a unique approach, choosing to cutout stylized bars into the PSU chassis to work as the fan grille. The fan inside we can see is semi-opaque and will help to spread the internal RGB lighting form the hub out through the fan to create a more luminous effect. The grille cutout design follows to the sides so that RGB lighting can spill out the side to offer more of an aesthetic appeal, but the fan being black-framed hampers that a bit. However, this is a design decision that most RGB PSU's have offered back to the era of Thermaltake RGB lit PSUs, which had an internal Riing fan in them.

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Flipping the PSU ninety degrees, and we see the side label, which may be visible depending upon your chassis design. The label carries gold-colored accents that may not fit with all system themes, but overall it's not excessively harsh or off-putting enough to say it would be bad for a build.

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Flipping another ninety degrees, and we have the opposing side of the fan grille. Here we have the main label for the Kratos, showing the name, serial number along with an output table. There are also a host of conformity and safety/compliance icons in place here, similar to what we saw ion the packaging.

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Flipping the final ninety degrees takes us to the visible opposing side in most chassis with the standard mounting of the PSU. We see the same label style along with the grille cutouts on the side to try to help with light spillover to viewing from the side. This likely can help with cooling air ingress as well.

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The input side of the Kratos shows where we plug our AC input cable. Here we also have the same style ventilation grille openings to allow the PSU to breathe and expel heat accordingly. Here we also find the main toggle, which will cut off the AC input. We also have two other controls here, the RGB control button and the silent mode toggle, which we discussed earlier.

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The final angle we will look at the Kratos is the output side of the supply. Here we see to the left the main cables which are fixed permanently and not modular. To the right, we have the four connections available for the PSU, and one of them is for the GPU pigtail lead, while the other three are for the peripheral cables. One odd thing to note is that there are three peripheral six pin connections, yet there are four peripheral cables included, so one of them cannot be used. Not that all four should be necessary for most users, but it is weird when you think about it.

Real World Test System & Observations

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Loading up the 2990WX and a pair of TITAN's (a TITAN XP CE and a TITAN V) shows a total power draw of 727W. The PSU in standard fan mode (not full speed) we see the PSU under a couple of hours of testing gets up to about 50C internal temps but never faltered in stability or caused any faults in the workload or crashes. One thing worth noting is you can see I synchronized the fan with the motherboard set to red, and as you can see, the PSU shines rather brilliantly through the top, but the sides must just be for air ingress as it does not allow any light to bleed in our testing. Also, if you have a PSU shroud, this effect will be lost due to not having a visual on the PSU itself.

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We are already close to the theoretical limit of the supply, so I wanted to go for the gusto and see how far the Kratos 750 could go. Much to my surprise, I was able to get just north of 900W under load. Granted, the internal temps raised to levels I likely would not want in a long term solution. Still, it is impressive to see that at the silent fan mode, this PSU could take this loading for several hours without missing a beat or having stability issues that would have caused a workload checksum to fail.

Final Thoughts

When I first had Gamdias reach out to have me look at one of their Kratos PSU's I was admittedly unsure of what to expect as I have seen some very bad PSU's in my time in this industry. I am quite pleased with what Gamdias was able to pull together with the Kratos we received. The unit performed amazingly well for what I expected. I do hope in the future they revise their connector options to make a bit more sense for real-world builds.

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What we like

First, up will be a gold rated PSU at this price point is a great deal if you don't mind the semi-modular aspect. The addition of RGB can help class up a build that may otherwise just have a black box as a PSU, especially if the system is built around an RGB aesthetic. The ability to pull immense amounts of power even at an auto quiet fan curve is impressive.

What do we think could be better?

I do feel like there are some improvements to the cabling, first would be the FDD connectors. I would like to see those ad adapters from PATA like other PSU's as it makes more sense to omit them on virtually any modern system. The ARGB cable I would like to see on its removable lead for those who do not care about or don't have an ARGB connector to use. The fact that pulling around 720W resulted in 50C temps internally is a bit troubling, but you should not be fully loading your PSU anyway, so it's kind of a wash.

After looking at the PSU physically, along with the testing cycle, I am impressed by the Kratos PSU. It's not a one size fits all solution as there are some great units out there for 20-40 bucks extra, but overall if you need this wattage and efficiency rating, the Kratos does an excellent job of getting things done. If you are to think about using the Kratos but are concerned due to Gamdias being a less familiar brand, maybe add a little extra wattage of overhead to help quell your fears.

Overall, Gamdias partnered up decently here and made a reliable power supply option with a good value with the Kratos P1 750W.

Shannon's Power Supply Test System Specifications

• Motherboard: ASUS Zenith Extreme Alpha (buy from Amazon)
• CPU: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX (buy from Amazon)
• Cooler: Custom Alphacool CPU Liquid Cooling (buy from Amazon)
• Memory: Corsair Vengeance RGB 3000MHz 32GB (buy from Amazon)
• Video Card: NVIDIA TITAN V (buy from Amazon)
• Video Card: NVIDIA TITAN Xp Collectors Edition (buy from Amazon)
• Video Card: NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti (buy from Amazon)
• Storage: SanDisk M.2 256GB
• Power Supply: GAMDIAS Kratos P1-750W Gold RGB Power Supply (buy from Amazon)
• OS: Microsoft Windows 10 Home 64-bit (buy from Amazon)