PurePower 460AP (W0063, 460W)

Resembling the previous model from the outside, the W0063 has a slightly different design of the case. It is made by HEC/Compucase whereas the W0057 is manufactured by Sirtec.

The PSU is very neatly assembled. It has an active PFC device and a classic circuit design with group voltage regulation. The vertically positioned card in the middle of the case carries the regulator and PFC controllers. A little lower, on the main card, there resides a standby source on a special-purpose TNY267P chip. There is yet another card near the right panel of the PSU, which carries an output voltage supervisor (on a Weltrend chip) and a fan speed controller.

The declared characteristics comply with the ATX12V 2.0 standard: the combined current on the +12V rail is as high as 30A whereas the +5V and +3.3V have an even higher load capacity than required (the max load on these rails was greatly lowered in the latest versions of the ATX power supply specification).

Although the input voltage is given with a slash as “115/230V”, the PSU doesn’t have an input voltage switch, just like any other power supply with active PFC: such PSUs can support either one input voltage or a whole range of voltages from 90 to 265V without manual switching (support for only one voltage is implemented as a means of making the PFC device cheaper; this voltage is always 230V because it’s low input voltages that put the PFC circuit under greater load).

The PSU offers the following cables and connectors:

• A mainboard power cable with a 20+4-pin connector, 58cm long
• A CPU power cable with a 4-pin ATX12V connector, 59cm long
• One cable with a 6-pin graphics card power connector; 59cm
• One cable with two SATA power connectors, 58cm to the first connector and 10cm more to each next one
• Two cables with three Molex plugs and one floppy mini-plug on each; 58cm to the first connector and 10cm more to each next one
• One cable with three Molex connectors; 58cm+10cm+10cm

The cross-load diagram for this power supply looks rather good, but the instability of the +5V voltage raises my apprehensions. This voltage is too high in the area the power consumption of modern computers corresponds to (the bottom right of the diagram). The +12V voltage, on the contrary, deflects no farther than by 2% from the nominal value in this area.

Unfortunately, the output voltage ripple is high at maximum load: it is a little higher than the acceptable 50 millivolts on the +5V rail. On the +12V rail the voltage ripple was 70 millivolts, which is below the acceptable limit of 120 millivolts. Take note of the oscillation period: its frequency is about 100kHz which is thrice higher than in typical power supplies. The higher operating frequency allows using smaller ferrites (transformer and chokes), thus simplifying the PSU’s component layout and improving its cooling, but the downside is that the higher the frequency, the stricter the requirements to the components are. That’s why such power supplies are rather rare. I can only recall the new series of PSUs from FSP Group that we have tested earlier in our labs - they had an operating frequency of 110kHz.

A Thermaltake TT-1225A fan (12V, 2.8W) is installed in this power supply. Its real manufacturer is Young Lin Tech., Ltd.

The PSU is not quiet; unlike in the W0057, its fan speed doesn’t change much as the temperature grows up, but the average speed is high enough for you to hear the hiss of the air. Well, the PSU might be very, very quiet even in comparison with non-Thermaltake models if the fan speed was growing up in a linear manner from somewhere like 700-800rpm (obviously, if the fan rotating at 1300rpm is capable of cooling the PSU at a load of almost 400W, its speed can be greatly reduced for a 150W load; even considering the lower efficiency under low loads, there’ll be over two times less heat dissipated in the case at 150W than at 400W).

The efficiency of this PSU is 81% at the maximum and below 80% on average. This is an average result. The power factor is good at 0.99.

Thus, the W0063 is a rather typical midrange power supply that doesn’t stand out among its competitors with any of its parameters. It offers a standard selection of connectors, produces an average amount of noise, and yields sufficiently stable voltages. On the other hand, there’s nothing I could find fault with. The high output voltage ripple will hardly be a problem in practice because it exceeds the required limits only by a little at full load and becomes weaker at low loads.

This PSU will fully satisfy many users who need just a well-made power supply without any extras. If you need maximum stability or silence, you may want to look at other PSU models (a manual modification of this PSU to have the fan speed controlled more efficiently is beyond the scope of this review).