The Cooler Master MasterWatt Lite 500 W is currently one of the cheapest power supplies of their portfolio in Europe, replacing couple of their older series. Some of them vere far away from quality ones so there is definitelly some room for improvement. On the other hand it is good to consider that this 500watter currently costs slightly less than 1500 CZK (under 45 Euros in Germany, 54 AUD in Australia, 30 USD with rebate in the US). For 200 CZK more you can get the award-winning G550M with much superior platform and also 50 W more so I wonder what the plan with this series actually is. The OEM for the MW series is Enhance Electronics.
The MasterWatt Lite 500 W only uses the ordinary group design platform which does not usually perform very well these days. There are two versions available: this european one (MasterWatt Lite 230V) we have is 80 PLUS 230V EU certified, the international one (MW Full Range) is 80 PLUS Bronze (@115 V) certified. It is pretty much the same thing so Cooler Master can just pick whichever it wants. I guess they selected “80 PLUS white” as marketing tool to diferentiate it from the GM series, though the full-range variant actually indeed is Bronze certifies, as Ecova confirms.
The MasterWatt Lite 500W has three more siblings, ranging from 400 to 700 W, the Full Range version currently only has 500W and 600W models. We can see it only has single powerfull +12V rail which delivers majority of the power output. The +3.3 and +5V rails provide the usual 20 A, +5 V SB is rated at 2.5 A and -12 V at 0.3 A. Cooler Master claims the units have full set of protections, including OCP and OTP, they also offer 3year warranty on top of that. I am already curious myself to see how it performs compared to the semi-modular GM series.
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