500W to 550W: 12 Power Supplies Compared

Tagan PipeRock BZ500 - Overview

The second Tagan power supply we have is the BZ500, called the "PipeRock" in Europe. Fortunately, this is the only power supply in today's roundup includes blinking lights. Yes, that's a trend we were happy to see fade away, although there are certainly people that still like some bling. If that's your thing, Tagan did a good job, with clearly visible lighting. This is a modular power supply, with blue lights on the peripheral connectors and red and green lights on the PCI-E connectors. We saw similar connectors on a Super Flower PSU, but as far as we know Tagan is the original creator of this design. There's a small switch on the back for "Normal" or "Turbo" mode; this switch actually just disables the OCP on the 12V rails, so you might want to leave it on "Normal".

Topower is the ODM for this power supply, and they manufacture all the other Tagan PSUs (and many other brands as well). The transient filtering looks good, but the capacitors are clearly lower end options. Tagan uses a Teapo capacitor for the primary and Samson and Tokin capacitors in the secondary.