Gigabyte B700H Power Supply Overview

The Gigabyte B700H is a 700W Semi-Modular PSU and it is 80 Plus Bronze certified.

It competes with Corsair’s CX Series and Cooler Master’s MWE Series. But in terms of pricing, it is much cheaper and has a Semi-Modular design that other Power Supplies in this price bracket lack.

Today, we are going to take a look at its features and specification and see if it’s worthy of your next build.

The OEM for B700H is CWT (Channel Well Technology) and it belongs to their GPK Series. The exact model is the CWT GPK700. CWT is a popular Power Supply Manufacturer and many other brands including Antec, Cooler Master, Corsair, Thermaltake, and Enermax use CWT in some of their PSU models.

For those of you who need a quick answer, here’s the short summary of this product.

It is a fairly decent Power Supply for budget and mid-range PCs and based on the features it offers, it gives excellent value for money. It is one of the cheapest Semi-Modular PSU on the market and the main Capacitor is a high-quality Japanese Capacitor. It is a really good alternative to the Corsair’s CX Series. I’ll recommend it for budget and mid-range builds up to an RTX 2060 Super/RX 5700 with R5 3600/R7 3700X/i5 9600K. For high-end PCs, you should consider spending more money on a better Power Supply.

    Unboxing

Gigabyte B700H Box Front

Here’s what the front side of the box looks like.

Gigabyte B700H Back

At the back, we can see some of the details like the features, power distribution, and the included cables.

User Manual in the Box

After opening the box, we will first come across the User Manual. Do check it out if you’re building a PC for the first time. Beneath the User Manual, there’s also a Gigabyte branded carry bag. I’m guessing it’s meant for either carrying the PSU or to store the extra cables.

Gigabyte B700H Box Opening

Next up, we have the Power Supply itself. Let’s take it out and have a closer look.

Gigabyte B700H Side View

If your PC case doesn’t have a PSU shroud, that’s how it is going to look from the side.

Power Supply Specification

Opposite to the side of the fan, you can get some Power figures that we have already seen on the box.

B700H Fan

Here’s what the Fan looks like. Only the 24-pin Motherboard connector and the 8-pin (4+4) CPU connector are pre-attached. It is good to see that only the essential cables are attached and there’s less clutter than PSUs like Antec EAG Pro series in which the PCI-E connector is also pre-attached.

B700H Fan from Close

It has a 120mm Double Ball bearing Fan with a Smart Fan control that controls its speed based on the load. The fan is inaudible at idle and even under a load of 300-350W, you can expect very little noise. The exact fan model used here is the Yate Loon D12BH-12. The same fan can also be found in Corsair’s CX Series.

Box Contents

Here is everything that you get inside the box. It’s good to see that Gigabyte has included some Velcro Straps to assist in cable management.

  • Power Supply
  • Modular Cables
  • Input Power Cable
  • Velcro Straps
  • Carry Bag
  • User Manual
  • Screws

PSU Package Contents

    Gigabyte B700H Specification

Name Gigabyte B700H
Form Factor ATX
Type Semi-Modular
Output Capacity 700W
Certification 80 Plus Bronze
Dimensions 140mm x 150mm x 86mm (D x W x H)
PFC Active
Rails Single
Fan-Size 120mm Double ball bearing
Protection OVP/OPP/SCP/UVP
Connectors 24-pin (20+4) for Motherboard, 8-pin (4+4) for CPU, 4x 8-pin (6+2) for PCI-Express, 7x SATA Cables, 3x 4-pin Peripheral (Molex) Cables, and 4-pin Floopy.
Cable Color Black
Cable Type Flat
Warranty 5 Years

You can get all the details about the PSU in the table above. To learn more, you can also visit the product page on Gigabyte’s Website.

It has Active PFC which is a better and more efficient way of correcting the Power Factor than the passive one. The PSU is 80 Plus Bronze certified and that means it will have at least 85% efficiency at 50% load, i.e. 350W.

There’s Overvoltage, Undervoltage, Overload, and Short Circuit protection in place which is another important feature to have. In case of any power outage, it will turn off the input but as always, I’ll highly recommend using a UPS or at least a Surge Protector alongside.

Apart from the pre-attached 24-pin MB and 8-pin CPU cable, we do get 4 PCI-E Cables, 7 SATA Cables, and 3 Molex Cables. You can get a better look at the power specification in the image below.

Gigabyte B700 Power Specification

It has a Single +12V Rail with an output current of 54 Ampere and an output power of 648W. That means theoretically you can use a CPU/GPU pair that can draw up to 648W.

    Is it right for you?

Being a budget PSU, it has a lot to offer. Currently, I do not have the necessary equipment to perform tests on this PSU, but there’s a good review that you can check out. The review is in Russian so you might want to use Google Translate. The next few lines are based on their review.

In their testing, the peak efficiency of the PSU was 88.6% at a load of 200W. The efficiency stays well above 85% between a load of 80W to 560W (approximately) and that’s the range where most low-end and mid-range systems will be running at peak.

80 Plus Bronze Certification requires a PSU to be at least 81%, 85%, and 81% efficient at the load of 20%, 50%, and 100% respectively. At these values, it showed an efficiency of 87.1%, 87.5%, and 82.6% respectively.

The PFC values are also right in-line with the 80 Plus Bronze Certification.

Under the 250W load, the fan speed of Gigabyte B700H stays at 940 RPM. But from 250W to 600W, it increases linearly and can go up to 2240 RPM in the 600 to 700W range.

They also did Overload testing and this PSU did extremely well up to 880W which is 26.6% higher than the rated wattage.

But is it right for your next PC?

For entry-level PC builds with a Pentium G4560/G5400, Athlon 200GE, or an APU like Ryzen 3 2200G/3200G, it would be an overkill.

These are the CPU/GPU pair that I’ll recommend this PSU with:

  • Core i3 9100F/Ryzen 5 1600/2600 with a GTX 1650 Super or RX 570 or RX 5500
  • Ryzen 5 3500/Core i5 9400F with GTX 1660 Super or 1660 Ti
  • Ryzen 5 3600/3600X with RTX 2060, 2060 Super or RX 5700
  • Ryzen 7 3700X with RTX 2060 Super or RX 5700

If you’re going with anything higher than this, I’ll highly recommend spending a little more and get something like the Antec Earthwatts Gold Pro 650W or the Corsair TX650M. If you’re thinking to push an i7-9700K or an i9-9900K to its limits with an RTX 2080 Ti, consider the Corsair’s RMx or RMi Series.

A Ryzen 9 3900X would still do a fine job with this PSU as it is far more efficient than Intel’s 9th Generation due to the new Zen 2 Architecture and 7nm Node.

    Final Words

The Gigabyte B700H boasts a lot of features and good components like the Japanese Capacitors and is certainly one of the best PSUs in its price segment.

While Japanese Capacitors and 80+ Bronze Rating is good to have, but that is not the only criteria to judge a Power Supply. In fact, even some of the non-Japanese capacitors in the market are on par with them.

There are many other factors like ripple suppression, load regulation, hold-up time, transient response, inrush Current and more that determine the quality of a PSU. Higher-end PSUs use better quality components that not only leads to better efficiency but better results in the factors I’ve mentioned above.

And better efficiency results in less energy loss and thus the components stay cooler and the fan stays silent.

The Gigabyte B700H does a really good job at its given price segment and is a good choice for low-end and mid-range PCs.

When it comes to future-proofing or upgradability, you would have a lot of headroom as Nvidia’s next-gen Ampere GPUs will be on the 7nm. Even AMD’s next-gen RDNA 2 architecture will have the primary focus on power efficiency as the RDNA based 1st Gen Navi GPUs are quite inefficient just like the previous GCN architecture.

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So, in the long run, budget PSUs will only get better at handling high-performance Graphics Cards.

Reasons to choose Gigabyte B700H:
  • Value for Money
  • Black & Flat Cables
  • Main Capacitors are Japanese
  • Silent Fan
  • Semi-Modular Design
  • 80 Plus Bronze Certified

For the PC configurations that I have mentioned in the previous section, this PSU can do a fairly good job. Though I wouldn’t recommend SLI or Crossfire on this PSU, it is certainly possible. A Crossfire of RX 580s should do fine but I wouldn’t say the same for something like a Vega 64.

If you’re buying a higher-end system with a GPU like RX 5700 XT or RTX 2070 Super and above, the Gigabyte B700H can still do a decent job but I would recommend a higher-end Power Supply.




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