Conclusion
In our humble opinion, Cyonic started off the right foot as a company. Instead of starting with very high power products, like many other companies did before, they opted to focus on just a few high performance 450-650 Watt PSUs. This power range is where the needs of the vast majority of PC users lie. A typical home/office PC would hardly ever reach a demand greater than 200 Watts and even a good gaming system with a single GPU should not require more than 400-450 Watts at peak power. As all switching PSUs operate best at about 50% load, the Cyonic models are ideal for such systems.
The overall performance of the AU-550x came as a little surprise to us. When we saw the minimal heatsinks and the modified platform, we initially expected it to perform worse than the Seasonic G-series model. True enough, the thermal performance of the AU-550x is slightly worse and it does get a little warmer when it is heavily stressed. However, to our surprise and despite the presence of the secondary vertical PCB and all the losses associated with the extra connections/cables, the Cyonic AU-550x is still a little more efficient than the standard platform it is based on. It also resists very high temperatures and can still deliver very good performance under very harsh conditions. The higher efficiency combats the heatsink mass reduction and allows the Cyonic AU-550x to maintain very low noise levels. The company could make the thermal control of the PSU more aggressive, with the fan speeding up faster and forcing it to maintain lower internal temperatures, but opted for excellent acoustics performance instead. Considering the very high quality components that this PSU is made of, we believe that is was a good trade-off.
When it comes to electrical performance, we were bewildered to see the massive difference between the minor voltage lines and the main 12V line. We had to repeat our tests several times just to make sure. The filtering of the 3.3V/5V lines is one of the best that we have ever seen, if not the best, with our instruments hardly capable of recording any ripple at all. On the other hand, the 12V line is well filtered, but nowhere near as perfectly as the minor voltage lines. The presence of very high quality capacitors throughout the design makes this even stranger, as it implies that the ripple does not come from the mediocre capabilities of an average capacitor. Nevertheless, even the maximum ripple that the 12 V line displayed was half that of the ATX design limit, so we should stress that this is not really a problem, just a peculiar characteristic of this particular PSU.
In summary, the Cyonic AU-550x does very well and we feel that the newly founded company started off with some very interesting products that are targeted at a wide audience. With a retail price of $90 plus shipping, the Cyonic AU-550x is well-priced as well. Most quality 80Plus Gold certified 550 Watts PSUs are currently retailing for $80-120, so that does not make the Cyonic AU-550x an astonishing deal but, considering its performance, quality and design, it certainly earns our recommendation.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7orrAp5utnZOde6S7zGiqoaenZIZ2f5Boq6GdXZjGsLrInGSarWVqfbl5z6ysZqqVq7amw45u