Features:
In terms of looks, the 650A doesn't really stand out amongst it's competitors; it's your standard powder black finish with a 120mm fan installed in the bottom. However, once you start to dig into the features behind the fancy covering of this supply you will see that it is clearly in a league of it's own.

Let's start with the fan, shall we? As I mentioned earlier, it's a 120mm ADDA fan that is intelligently controlled by the load on the power supply. This means it won't always be running at full speed because it would simply be wasting energy and creating unwanted noise. Being a two-ball bearing fan it has an estimated MTBF of around 100,000 hrs of operation. What makes this fan control different than other power supplies is that when the load is under approximately 10% (approx 65W), the fan will completely shut off and render this power supply perfectly noiseless. For people running beefier systems I'll be honest in saying you may never have a load low enough on the power supply to see this happen. However, for those running lower power systems and even those wanting to build a PC based around something like Intel's new Atom processor, you would be far more likely to see the power supply running in this stage. According to the fan curve for this exact model, the fan will stay well under 1000 RPM up until the power supply reaches around 45% of maximum load. Overall this power supply will offer fairly silent operation for most regular PC use, we'll wait until testing time to see how well this truly holds up.

 
(Click to see enlarged versions)

The 650A is an 80PLUS rated power supply which I'm glad to see more and more manufacturers complying with. This means it has an efficiency of 80% or above under regular operation. For you, this means the power supply will more effectively use the power it takes from your wall socket and therefore waste less power and create less heat. Since high efficiency power supplies create less heat, this is part of the contributing factor to the fan having lower and quieter operating speeds.

The cables on this power supply are not modular, which is a design that has it's ups and downs. Most people like modular cable designs because of the free space you can gain in your case when you detach all those messy cables you aren't using. However, a modular cable design adds more resistance to the lines at the point where they connect to the power supply. In fact, if you compare a cable on a modular power supply to the same cable on a hard-wired design, the modular one has the added resistance of an extra two meters of cable when compared to the hard-wired one! For those looking for a serious performing power supply without any gimmicks or limitations, choosing a hard-wired design is often the best way to go and I was glad to see GlacialPower putting the 650A in this range of supplies.

Under the hood, the 650A uses a dual 12V rail design with ActivePFC (power factor correction). Although the big thing used to be using as many 12V rails in a power supply as possible, newer hardware has started to put an end to that with higher power draws. A lot of newer high-performance video cards are pulling more wattage on their own than some of the 12V rails were putting out on those designs. With this in mind, most manufacturers are going back to a single or double 12V rail design on new power supplies to allow each rail to handle larger wattages.

Full of protection features, the 650A features short circuit protection, over voltage protection, over current protection, over power protection and over temperature protection. To help further prolong component life, the fan in the power supply will continue running for a few minutes after the computer has been shut down. By allowing the hot/warm internal components of the power supply to properly cool down will greatly help increase their life span. In fact, this is something I wish that more computer motherboards would do with the CPU fan to help preserve this critical component.

The output connectors consist of a 20/24pin ATX power connector, one 4+4pin CPU connector, six molex connectors, six SATA connectors, 1 FDD connector and two PCI-E 6+2pin connectors. I was disappointed to see that only the ATX power wires were sleeved, none of the others were. In a power supply that has already met the signs of quality in so many areas, I was a little disappointed to see that sleeving all the cables was not taken care of.