X-bit labs

ATX Power Supply Units Roundup: 9 Powerful Models Tested (page 10)

Category: Other

by Oleg Artamonov

[ 02/28/2006 | 10:46 PM ]

There are rubber plugs for all the output connectors of the PSU – the three connectors for drives are closed with them in the snapshot above.

When open, the power supply exposes its superb thin-ribbed copper heatsinks (resembling CPU heatsinks in 1U servers) as well as an 80mm fan that is blowing at them. The fan is fully hidden in the case and cannot be seen from the outside. The LCD display card is on the right; the flat red-colored thermal sensor that sticks out from it measures the air temperature inside the PSU.

Two heat pipes are fastened on the smaller heatsink; they transfer heat on to the outside heat-spreader.

Well, if you remove the pretty-looking top parts of the heatsinks, the view is not at all handsome. You see dirty, slightly oxidized plates without a trace of thermal paste. The heat-transfer efficiency can hardly be high here.

Moreover, the efficiency of the fan itself is questionable. There’s an almost blank wall behind it, without any vent openings. The openings above the fan and heatsinks let a large portion of the air get out of the case immediately instead of making it cool the heatsinks. In the external panel of the case, on the contrary, there are very few vent openings. They are in fact only in the external heatsink, while most of that panel is occupied by the LCD display. Thus, the PSU’s cooling system hinders the movement of the air stream greatly. It could have been made more efficient, I guess.

This power supply comes with the following cables:

• Mainboard power cable with a 24-pin connector (a 4-pin part can be detached if necessary), 47cm long
• EPS12V+ATX12V CPU power cable with two connectors, 8-pin and 4-pin; this cable is 48cm long from the PSU to the 8-pin plug and 15cm more to the 4-pin plug (the section of the wires that go to the latter plug seems rather too small to me, to tell you the truth)
• One cable with two Molex connectors (48cm+17cm)
• Two cables with two Molex connectors and one floppy mini-plug on each (48cm+14cm+14cm)
• One cable with two SATA power connectors (49cm+18cm; the +3.3V voltage is not supplied on the connectors)
• A 48cm-long graphics card cable; it is attached to the PSU via a Molex connector with a single +12V pin.

I can’t be silent about the way the cables are designed here. The idea to pack each cable into a separate pipe for easier laying-out inside the PC case has been developed to the point of ultimate absurdity in the Magnum 500. All the cables are double-screened (aluminum foil and wire braiding above it; this screening doesn’t have any big effect on the PSU’s parameters, by the way); a thick transparent plastic insulates everything on top. As a result, the cables are so stiff that it may become a serious problem to lay them out in a small-size PC case.

Moreover, the braiding sticks out a few millimeters from under the insulating pipe. I guess the PSU should have come with some insulating tape for the user to finish the cables off to a normal condition, but I couldn’t find anything like that in the PSU box.