The Enermax PlatiGemini 1200W ATX 3.1 + ATX12VO PSU Review: The Swiss Army Knife
In the retail PC PSU space, most of the focus on new standards and their capabilities in the past couple of years has been on ATX 3.0 and it's quick follow-up successor, ATX 3.1. And while the revised ATX standard is certainly the most important new standard for the rank-and-file PC builder, it's not the only standard that has been released as of late. Intel and its partners have also developed a standard, that in some respects, goes even farther out by dropping some of the legacy aspects of ATX and its increasingly esoteric secondary voltages: ATX12VO.
Short for "ATX 12 Volts Only", ATX12VO is a standard that's been slower to take off as it makes a pretty hard break with backwards compatibility. But with so many motherboard functions running off of 12V (CPUs and GPUs, for a start), the need for a PSU to provide secondary voltages like 3.3V and 5V just aren't what they once were 20 years ago - or even 10. So we've slowly seen PC manufacturers and motherboard makers test the waters, with a handful of designs using the more petite ATX standard.
Meanwhile on the power supply side of things, the outcome has been a bit more interesting, if messy. While ATX12VO motherboards need matching PSUs, there's nothing to say that such a PSU can only be ATX12VO. To reference an ancient meme, the thought at some PSU manufacturers has been "why not both?", leading to high-end PSUs that can bridge the compatibility gap by offering both ATX 3.1 and ATX12VO compatibility.
The first example of such a PSU to make it in our labs is Enermax's new PlatiGemini 1200W PSU. Designed to be the Swiss knife of modern top-tier PCs, Enermax's PSU offers support for both ATX 3.1 and ATX12VO - ensuring it can power virtually any PC - while driving both modes with a sizeable 1200W design that can pretty much power virtually any desktop PC one can hope to build today. Plus, with features like fully modular cables with per-wire sleeving, a dynamic hybrid fan control for optimal cooling, and advanced power topologies, the PlatiGemini 1200W aims to deliver both reliability and performance on top of its multi-mode compatibility. The end result is a very interesting (if premium) product that can do it all.
Cases/Cooling/PSUs
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In Light of Stability Concerns, Intel Issues Request to Motherboards Vendors to Actually Follow Stock Power Settings Across the internet, from online forums such as Reddit to various other tech media outlets, there's a lot of furor around reports of Intel's top-end 14th and 13th Gen K series of processors running into stability issues. As Intel's flagship chips, these parts come aggressively clocked in order to maximize performance through various implementations of boost and turbo, leaving them running close to their limits out of the box. But with high-end motherboards further goosing these chips to wring even more performance out of them, it would seem that the Intel desktop ecosystem has finally reached a tipping point where all of these efforts to boost performance have pushed these flagship chips to unstable conditions. To that end, Intel has released new gudiance to its consumer motherboard partners, strongly encouraging them to actually implment Intel's stock power settings, and to use those baseline settings as their out-of-the-box default.
While the underlying conditions are nothing new – we've published stories time and time again about motherboard features such as multi-core enhancement (MCE) and raised power consumption limits that seek to maximize how hard and how long systems are able to turbo boost – the issue has finally come to a head in the last couple of months thanks to accumulating reports of system instability with Intel's 13900K and 14900K processors. These instability problems are eventually solved by either tamping down on these motherboard performance-boosting features – bringing the chips back down to something closer to Intel's official operating parameters – or downclocking the chips entirely.
Intel first began publicly investigating the matter on the 27th of February, when Intel's Communications Manager, Thomas Hannaford, posted a thread on Intel's Community Product Support Forms titled "Regarding Reports of 13th/14th Gen Unlocked Desktop Users Experiencing Stability Issues". In this thread, Thomas Hannaford said, "Intel is aware of reports regarding Intel Core 13th and 14th Gen unlocked desktop processors experiencing issues with certain workloads. We're engaged with our partners and are conducting analysis of the reported issues. If you are experiencing these issues, please reach out to Intel Customer Support for further assistance in the interim."
Since that post went up, additional reports have been circulating about instability issues across various online forums and message boards. The underlying culprit has been theorized to be motherboards implementing an array of strategies to improve chip performance, including aggressive multi-core enhancement settings, "unlimited" PL2 turbo, and reduced load line calibration settings. At no point do any of these settings overclock a CPU and push it to a higher clockspeed than it's validated for, but these settings do everything possible to keep a chip at the highest clockspeed possible at all times – and in the process seem to have gone a step too far.
From "Why Intel Processors Draw More Power Than Expected: TDP and Turbo Explained"
We wrote a piece initially covering multi-core enhancement in 2012, detailing how motherboard manufacturers try to stay competitive with each other and leverage any headroom within the silicon to output the highest performance levels. And more recently, we've talked about how desktop systems with Intel chips are now regularly exceeding their rated TDPs – sometimes by extreme amounts – as motherboard vendors continue to push them to run as hard as possible for the best performance.
But things have changed since 2012. At the time, this wasn't so much of an issue, as overclocking was actually very favorable to increasing the performance of processors. But in 2024 with chips such as the Intel Core i9-14900K, we have CPUs shipping with a maximum turbo clock speed of 6.0 GHz and a peak power consumption of over 400 Watts, figures that were only a pipe dream a decade ago.
Jumping to the present time, over the weekend Intel released a statement about the matter to its partners, outlining their investigation so far and their sug... CPUs
From "Why Intel Processors Draw More Power Than Expected: TDP and Turbo Explained"
ASMedia Preps USB4 v2 Controller and PHY 
The USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) introduced USB4 version 2.0 in fall 2022, and it expects systems and devices with the tech to emerge later this year and into next year. These upcoming products will largely rely on Intel's Barlow Ridge controller, a full-featured Thunderbolt 5 controller that goes above and beond the baseline USB4 v2 spec. And though extremely capable, Intel's Thunderbolt controllers are also quite expensive, and Barlow Ridge isn't expected to be any different. Fortunately, for system and device vendors that just need a basic USB4 v2 solution, ASMedia is also working on its own USB4 v2 controller.
At Computex 2024, ASMedia demonstrated a prototype of its upcoming USB4 v2 physical interface (PHY), which will support USB4 v2's new Gen 4 (160Gbps) data rates and the associated PAM-3 signal encoding. The prototype was implemented using an FPGA, as the company yet has to tape out the completed controller.
Ultimately, the purpose of showing off a FPGA-based PHY at Computex was to allow ASMedia to demonstrate their current PHY design. With the shift to PAM-3 encoding for USB4 v2, ASMedia (and the rest of the USB ecosystem) must develop significantly more complex controllers – and there's no part of that more critical than a solid and reliable PHY design.
As part of their demonstration, ASMedia had a classic eye diagram display. The eye diagram demoed has a clear opening in the center, which is indicative of good signal integrity, as the larger the eye opening, the less distortion and noise in the signal. The horizontal width of the eye opening represents the time window in which the signal can be sampled correctly, so the relatively narrow horizontal spread of the eye opening suggests that there is minimal jitter, meaning the signal transitions are consistent and predictable. Finally, the vertical height of the eye opening indicates the signal amplitude and the rather tall eye opening suggests a higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), meaning that the signal is strong compared to any noise present.
ASMedia itself is one of the major suppliers for discrete USB controllers, so the availability of ASMedia's USB4 v2 chip is crucial for adoption of the standard in general. While Intel will spearhead the industry with their Barlow Ridge Thunderbolt 5/USB4 v2 controller, ASMedia's controller is poised to end up in a far larger range of devices. So the importance of the company's USB4 v2 PHY demo is hard to overstate.
Demos aside, ASMedia is hoping to tape the chip out soon. If all goes well, the company expects their first USB4 v2 controllers to hit the market some time in the second half of 2025.
Peripherals
In Light of Stability Concerns, Intel Issues Request to Motherboards Vendors to Actually Follow Stock Power Settings Across the internet, from online forums such as Reddit to various other tech media outlets, there's a lot of furor around reports of Intel's top-end 14th and 13th Gen K series of processors running into stability issues. As Intel's flagship chips, these parts come aggressively clocked in order to maximize performance through various implementations of boost and turbo, leaving them running close to their limits out of the box. But with high-end motherboards further goosing these chips to wring even more performance out of them, it would seem that the Intel desktop ecosystem has finally reached a tipping point where all of these efforts to boost performance have pushed these flagship chips to unstable conditions. To that end, Intel has released new gudiance to its consumer motherboard partners, strongly encouraging them to actually implment Intel's stock power settings, and to use those baseline settings as their out-of-the-box default.
While the underlying conditions are nothing new – we've published stories time and time again about motherboard features such as multi-core enhancement (MCE) and raised power consumption limits that seek to maximize how hard and how long systems are able to turbo boost – the issue has finally come to a head in the last couple of months thanks to accumulating reports of system instability with Intel's 13900K and 14900K processors. These instability problems are eventually solved by either tamping down on these motherboard performance-boosting features – bringing the chips back down to something closer to Intel's official operating parameters – or downclocking the chips entirely.
Intel first began publicly investigating the matter on the 27th of February, when Intel's Communications Manager, Thomas Hannaford, posted a thread on Intel's Community Product Support Forms titled "Regarding Reports of 13th/14th Gen Unlocked Desktop Users Experiencing Stability Issues". In this thread, Thomas Hannaford said, "Intel is aware of reports regarding Intel Core 13th and 14th Gen unlocked desktop processors experiencing issues with certain workloads. We're engaged with our partners and are conducting analysis of the reported issues. If you are experiencing these issues, please reach out to Intel Customer Support for further assistance in the interim."
Since that post went up, additional reports have been circulating about instability issues across various online forums and message boards. The underlying culprit has been theorized to be motherboards implementing an array of strategies to improve chip performance, including aggressive multi-core enhancement settings, "unlimited" PL2 turbo, and reduced load line calibration settings. At no point do any of these settings overclock a CPU and push it to a higher clockspeed than it's validated for, but these settings do everything possible to keep a chip at the highest clockspeed possible at all times – and in the process seem to have gone a step too far.
From "Why Intel Processors Draw More Power Than Expected: TDP and Turbo Explained"
We wrote a piece initially covering multi-core enhancement in 2012, detailing how motherboard manufacturers try to stay competitive with each other and leverage any headroom within the silicon to output the highest performance levels. And more recently, we've talked about how desktop systems with Intel chips are now regularly exceeding their rated TDPs – sometimes by extreme amounts – as motherboard vendors continue to push them to run as hard as possible for the best performance.
But things have changed since 2012. At the time, this wasn't so much of an issue, as overclocking was actually very favorable to increasing the performance of processors. But in 2024 with chips such as the Intel Core i9-14900K, we have CPUs shipping with a maximum turbo clock speed of 6.0 GHz and a peak power consumption of over 400 Watts, figures that were only a pipe dream a decade ago.
Jumping to the present time, over the weekend Intel released a statement about the matter to its partners, outlining their investigation so far and their sug... CPUs
From "Why Intel Processors Draw More Power Than Expected: TDP and Turbo Explained"
ASMedia Preps USB4 v2 Controller and PHY
The USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) introduced USB4 version 2.0 in fall 2022, and it expects systems and devices with the tech to emerge later this year and into next year. These upcoming products will largely rely on Intel's Barlow Ridge controller, a full-featured Thunderbolt 5 controller that goes above and beond the baseline USB4 v2 spec. And though extremely capable, Intel's Thunderbolt controllers are also quite expensive, and Barlow Ridge isn't expected to be any different. Fortunately, for system and device vendors that just need a basic USB4 v2 solution, ASMedia is also working on its own USB4 v2 controller.
At Computex 2024, ASMedia demonstrated a prototype of its upcoming USB4 v2 physical interface (PHY), which will support USB4 v2's new Gen 4 (160Gbps) data rates and the associated PAM-3 signal encoding. The prototype was implemented using an FPGA, as the company yet has to tape out the completed controller.
Ultimately, the purpose of showing off a FPGA-based PHY at Computex was to allow ASMedia to demonstrate their current PHY design. With the shift to PAM-3 encoding for USB4 v2, ASMedia (and the rest of the USB ecosystem) must develop significantly more complex controllers – and there's no part of that more critical than a solid and reliable PHY design.
As part of their demonstration, ASMedia had a classic eye diagram display. The eye diagram demoed has a clear opening in the center, which is indicative of good signal integrity, as the larger the eye opening, the less distortion and noise in the signal. The horizontal width of the eye opening represents the time window in which the signal can be sampled correctly, so the relatively narrow horizontal spread of the eye opening suggests that there is minimal jitter, meaning the signal transitions are consistent and predictable. Finally, the vertical height of the eye opening indicates the signal amplitude and the rather tall eye opening suggests a higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), meaning that the signal is strong compared to any noise present.
ASMedia itself is one of the major suppliers for discrete USB controllers, so the availability of ASMedia's USB4 v2 chip is crucial for adoption of the standard in general. While Intel will spearhead the industry with their Barlow Ridge Thunderbolt 5/USB4 v2 controller, ASMedia's controller is poised to end up in a far larger range of devices. So the importance of the company's USB4 v2 PHY demo is hard to overstate.
Demos aside, ASMedia is hoping to tape the chip out soon. If all goes well, the company expects their first USB4 v2 controllers to hit the market some time in the second half of 2025.
Peripherals
Silicon Motion Demonstrates Flexible Data Placement on MonTitan Gen 5 Enterprise SSD Platform 
At FMS 2024, the technological requirements from the storage and memory subsystem took center stage. Both SSD and controller vendors had various demonstrations touting their suitability for different stages of the AI data pipeline - ingestion, preparation, training, checkpointing, and inference. Vendors like Solidigm have different types of SSDs optimized for different stages of the pipeline. At the same time, controller vendors have taken advantage of one of the features introduced recently in the NVM Express standard - Flexible Data Placement (FDP).
FDP involves the host providing information / hints about the areas where the controller could place the incoming write data in order to reduce the write amplification. These hints are generated based on specific block sizes advertised by the device. The feature is completely backwards-compatible, with non-FDP hosts working just as before with FDP-enabled SSDs, and vice-versa.
Silicon Motion's MonTitan Gen 5 Enterprise SSD Platform was announced back in 2022. Since then, Silicon Motion has been touting the flexibility of the platform, allowing its customers to incorporate their own features as part of the customization process. This approach is common in the enterprise space, as we have seen with Marvell's Bravera SC5 SSD controller in the DapuStor SSDs and Microchip's Flashtec controllers in the Longsys FORESEE enterprise SSDs.
At FMS 2024, the company was demonstrating the advantages of flexible data placement by allowing a single QLC SSD based on their MonTitan platform to take part in different stages of the AI data pipeline while maintaining the required quality of service (minimum bandwidth) for each process. The company even has a trademarked name (PerformaShape) for the firmware feature in the controller that allows the isolation of different concurrent SSD accesses (from different stages in the AI data pipeline) to guarantee this QoS. Silicon Motion claims that this scheme will enable its customers to get the maximum write performance possible from QLC SSDs without negatively impacting the performance of other types of accesses.
Silicon Motion and Phison have market leadership in the client SSD controller market with similar approaches. However, their enterprise SSD controller marketing couldn't be more different. While Phison has gone in for a turnkey solution with their Gen 5 SSD platform (to the extent of not adopting the white label route for this generation, and instead opting to get the SSDs qualified with different cloud service providers themselves), Silicon Motion is opting for a different approach. The flexibility and customization possibilities can make platforms like the MonTitan appeal to flash array vendors.
Storage
Samsung's 128 TB-Class BM1743 Enterprise SSD Displayed at FMS 2024 
Samsung had quietly launched its BM1743 enterprise QLC SSD last month with a hefty 61.44 TB SKU. At FMS 2024, the company had the even larger 122.88 TB version of that SSD on display, alongside a few recorded benchmarking sessions. Compared to the previous generation, the BM1743 comes with a 4.1x improvement in I/O performance, improvement in data retention, and a 45% improvement in power efficiency for sequential writes.
The 128 TB-class QLC SSD boasts of sequential read speeds of 7.5 GBps and write speeds of 3 GBps. Random reads come in at 1.6 M IOPS, while 16 KB random writes clock in at 45K IOPS. Based on the quoted random write access granularity, it appears that Samsung is using a 16 KB indirection unit (IU) to optimize flash management. This is similar to the strategy adopted by Solidigm with IUs larger than 4K in their high-capacity SSDs.
A recorded benchmark session on the company's PM9D3a 8-channel Gen 5 SSD was also on display.
The SSD family is being promoted as a mainstream option for datacenters, and boasts of sequential reads up to 12 GBps and writes up to 6.8 GBps. Random reads clock in at 2 M IOPS, and random writes at 400 K IOPS.
Available in multiple form-factors up to 32 TB (M.2 tops out at 2 TB), the drive's firmware includes optional support for flexible data placement (FDP) to help address the write amplification aspect.
The PM1753 is the current enterprise SSD flagship in Samsung's lineup. With support for 16 NAND channels and capacities up to 32 TB, this U.2 / E3.S SSD has advertised sequential read and write speeds of 14.8 GBps and 11 GBps respectively. Random reads and writes for 4 KB accesses are listed at 3.4 M and 600 K IOPS.
Samsung claims a 1.7x performance improvement and a 1.7x power efficiency improvement over the previous generation (PM1743), making this TLC SSD suitable for AI servers.
The 9th Gen. V-NAND wafer was also available for viewing, though photography was prohibited. Mass production of this flash memory began in April 2024.
Storage
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In Light of Stability Concerns, Intel Issues Request to Motherboards Vendors to Actually Follow Stock Power Settings Across the internet, from online forums such as Reddit to various other tech media outlets, there's a lot of furor around reports of Intel's top-end 14th and 13th Gen K series of processors running into stability issues. As Intel's flagship chips, these parts come aggressively clocked in order to maximize performance through various implementations of boost and turbo, leaving them running close to their limits out of the box. But with high-end motherboards further goosing these chips to wring even more performance out of them, it would seem that the Intel desktop ecosystem has finally reached a tipping point where all of these efforts to boost performance have pushed these flagship chips to unstable conditions. To that end, Intel has released new gudiance to its consumer motherboard partners, strongly encouraging them to actually implment Intel's stock power settings, and to use those baseline settings as their out-of-the-box default.
While the underlying conditions are nothing new – we've published stories time and time again about motherboard features such as multi-core enhancement (MCE) and raised power consumption limits that seek to maximize how hard and how long systems are able to turbo boost – the issue has finally come to a head in the last couple of months thanks to accumulating reports of system instability with Intel's 13900K and 14900K processors. These instability problems are eventually solved by either tamping down on these motherboard performance-boosting features – bringing the chips back down to something closer to Intel's official operating parameters – or downclocking the chips entirely.
Intel first began publicly investigating the matter on the 27th of February, when Intel's Communications Manager, Thomas Hannaford, posted a thread on Intel's Community Product Support Forms titled "Regarding Reports of 13th/14th Gen Unlocked Desktop Users Experiencing Stability Issues". In this thread, Thomas Hannaford said, "Intel is aware of reports regarding Intel Core 13th and 14th Gen unlocked desktop processors experiencing issues with certain workloads. We're engaged with our partners and are conducting analysis of the reported issues. If you are experiencing these issues, please reach out to Intel Customer Support for further assistance in the interim."
Since that post went up, additional reports have been circulating about instability issues across various online forums and message boards. The underlying culprit has been theorized to be motherboards implementing an array of strategies to improve chip performance, including aggressive multi-core enhancement settings, "unlimited" PL2 turbo, and reduced load line calibration settings. At no point do any of these settings overclock a CPU and push it to a higher clockspeed than it's validated for, but these settings do everything possible to keep a chip at the highest clockspeed possible at all times – and in the process seem to have gone a step too far.
From "Why Intel Processors Draw More Power Than Expected: TDP and Turbo Explained"
We wrote a piece initially covering multi-core enhancement in 2012, detailing how motherboard manufacturers try to stay competitive with each other and leverage any headroom within the silicon to output the highest performance levels. And more recently, we've talked about how desktop systems with Intel chips are now regularly exceeding their rated TDPs – sometimes by extreme amounts – as motherboard vendors continue to push them to run as hard as possible for the best performance.
But things have changed since 2012. At the time, this wasn't so much of an issue, as overclocking was actually very favorable to increasing the performance of processors. But in 2024 with chips such as the Intel Core i9-14900K, we have CPUs shipping with a maximum turbo clock speed of 6.0 GHz and a peak power consumption of over 400 Watts, figures that were only a pipe dream a decade ago.
Jumping to the present time, over the weekend Intel released a statement about the matter to its partners, outlining their investigation so far and their sug... CPUs
From "Why Intel Processors Draw More Power Than Expected: TDP and Turbo Explained"
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