Introduction

We would like to thank Akasa for supplying the review sample.

Most of you probably know Akasa from their cooling solutions or their accessories; however the fact is that the same company has released quite a few PSUs addressing mainly users with low budget. In general Akasa is a company which shows high interest mainly to the mainstream market, since they want to provide affordable products with as high as possible price/performance ratio. Hopefully the same will apply to their newly released Venom Power series of PSUs. This series currently consists of only two members with the stronger one having 750W capacity while the other has 550W.

Today we will take a detailed look at the Venom Power 550W, which besides the poisonous name has a single +12V rail, utilizes a semi-modular cabling design with only two fixed wires, is equipped with a silent 135mm fan and according to Akasa its efficiency exceeds 80%. Here we should note that the new Venom Power units are not certified by the 80 Plus organization, so they don't feature the corresponding badge. The main reason behind the lack of an official efficiency rating is that these units are compatible only with 220-240VAC input and not with 115VAC, the input that 80 Plus uses to evaluate desktop PSUs.
Nevertheless the lack of this badge means lowers cost, since it doesn't come free but requires an amount of money to be paid. Also throughout our tests we will easily find out more about the efficiency of the Venom Power 550W so you will get the idea. We should also not forget to mention the price of this PSU since it is one of its stronger selling points. In EU online stores we found it for about $75, a fairly good price for a modular 550W PSU.