WinFast FA-380A

WinFast FA-550A

The interior of the cases betrays their real manufacturer. It is Channel Well Technology whose products have already been to our labs under the Antec brand (see our article called Powerful Power Supply Units Roundup ). These PSUs from Foxconn are very much alike to Antec’s, having the same components and the same shape of the heatsinks with the characteristic large rectangular +12V load resistor on one of them. And they feature independent regulation of the output voltages, too, as indicated by the three coils on the unit’s output. Well, there are differences (for instance, the active PFC device resided on a separate card in the Antec PSU), but the similarity is still beyond doubt.

It’s funny, but even a part of the marking alludes to Antec. Antec sells its PSUs under the TruePower brand and the word True is also present on the label on the Foxconn PSUs. The WinFast FA-380A and FA-550A not only meet the requirements of the ATX12V 2.0 standard they are declared to comply with, but even permit a very serious load on the +5V rail. The maximum allowable current on this rail is 40A for the senior model, while the standard requires only 15A (for 450W PSUs – the current version of the standard doesn’t describe higher-wattage models).

By the way, you may have noticed that the combined allowable load on the two +12W outputs is lower than the total of the currents specified for each of them independently. As I wrote in my previous reports, this is because the PSU does not really have two independent +12V outputs. There is only one +12V circuit in it, but it is divided with current limiters into two physical outputs. There’s nothing wrong in the inconsistency between the total load and the sum of the separate currents – the manufacturer just provides a more flexible load distribution among the PSU’s power rails by setting up the mentioned current limiters like that. You must only make sure that the declared maximum combined load is not too low because some unscrupulous manufacturers have already “redesigned” their older power supplies with a relatively low-current +12V output into new ones by editing the label. Foxconn is blameless, though. Even the junior 380W unit can yield up to 28A which is above of what the standard recommends for units of such wattage.

The junior model (FA-380A) is equipped with the following cables:

• One mainboard cable with a 24-pin connector (with a detachable 4-pin part), 55cm long
• One cable for PCI Express graphics cards with a 6-pin connector, 53cm long
• One ATX12V cable with a 4-pin connector, 52cm
• Two cables with two Molex connectors and one mini-plug for the floppy drive on each (53cm from the PSU to the first connector and then 15cm more to each next connector)
• A SATA power cable with two connectors (54cm+15cm)
• A cable of the fan speed sensor

The senior model differs in three points: 1) it has an 8-pin EPS12V connector instead of the ATX12V (they are backward-compatible – the ATX12V connector is exactly one half of the EPS12V, so you can easily plug it in if the neighboring mainboard components do not interfere), 2) it has one more cable with two SATA connectors and 3) a second graphics card cable with a 6-pin connector.

The Molex connectors on both units have the now-popular side lobes for easy extraction.

The FA-380A is cooled by a Top Motor DF1212BC fan, the FA-550A by a Top Motor DF1212BB-3 (with blue LED-based highlighting). The former fan was silent (I could only hear the noise of the air stream as it was passing through the case of the PSU), but the latter produced a quiet buzzing sound with its blades.