Packaging

The packaging has a medium to large size, considering that it houses a small capacity unit. On the front, we find Kingwin's logo in the top right corner and right underneath it resides the Platinum logo. This is the most desired badge for today's PSUs! In the middle and a little on the right the "550W" indicates of course the max capacity of the unit and finally on the bottom we discover the series name, Absolute Platinum. Usually the rear side of the PSU box has interesting info on details, characteristics etc. Well not in this case, if you want to take a peek at these details you should look at the top and the bottom sides of the box.

Contents

The PSU is protected by two thin pieces of packing foam and on top of that it's inside a bubble wrap bag, so most likely it will reach your hands safely. Unfortunately in order to reach the desired low price point some compromises had to be made in the bundle so don't expect to find any Velcro or even zip ties. Only the necessary user's manual, a rather thin AC power cord and a set of thumb screws were included. Strangely enough Kingwin preferred to provide the more expensive thumb screws instead of plain ones, despite their efforts to cut cost. Nevertheless we are not going to complain about it!

Exterior

The unit has a plain look and the paint/finish isn't eye catching, that's for sure. The only thing that distinguishes the AP-550 from other lower performance, mainstream, models is the white fan and the good sleeving job done on the fixed cables. In general the external appearance clearly shows that this unit doesn't have any bells and whistles and Kingwin mainly focused on its performance and not on its looks. We can't but agree of course with this strategy, since this is the only way to provide an affordable Platinum PSU nowadays. After all, they had to cut production cost somewhere, and they chose looks and usability (non-modular design) but as they state they left performance intact and this is what matters the most to the majority of users.