X-bit labs

ATX Power Supply Units Roundup: 9 Powerful Models Tested (page 15)

Category: Other

by Oleg Artamonov

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

The Zeus ST65ZF offers the following cables and connectors:

• Mainboard cable with a 24-pin connector (with a detachable 4-pin part), 55cm long; this cable uses wires with a 16AWG section
• CPU cable with a 8-pin EPS12V connector, which is solid, i.e. does not split in two halves; 55cm long; this and the remaining cables use thinner wires with an 18AWG section
• Two graphics card cables with a 6-pin connector, 55cm long
• One cable with a 6-pin connector with +12V and +3.3V voltages, 55cm long. You can’t plug it into your graphics card by mistake due to the different configuration of the connector keys
• Two cables with three Molex connectors and one mini-plug for the floppy drive (52cm from the PSU to the first connector, 25cm more to the next connector, and 14cm more to each next connector, the floppy drive one being the last on the cable, as usual)
• Two cables with two SATA power connectors on each, 50cm from the PSU to the first plug and 25cm more to the next plug

The cables are hidden in braided screens, except for the cables for hard disk drives.

The cross-load characteristic graph of the power supply looks good, but not quite impressive: the +12V voltage goes through all the range from the minimum to the maximum limit. The +5V and +3.3V voltages aren’t very stable, either. The PSU yields the declared output power, though.

The voltage ripple on the +5V, +12V and +3.3V rails was 35, 42 and 28 millivolts, respectively, under a load of 630W.

The Zeus ST65ZF uses an 80mm ADDA AD0812UB-A70GL fan. Its speed is varied under loads ranging from 200 to 450W. Outside this range, the fan speed is constant. The min speed is over 2500rpm, so the fan can’t be called quiet even at small loads on the PSU; the maximum speed is over 3600rpm.

The PSU efficiency is good at near 79%. The power factor is what you can expect from a regular power supply with active power factor correction.

The Zeus ST65ZF is positioned by the manufacturer as a power supply for workstations, although the term “workstation” has lost much of its original meaning nowadays. Some twenty years ago it used to denote high-performance PCs installed at work places and intended for graphics processing and other computation-intensive tasks, but ordinary home PCs have long acquired the same technical characteristics and the term “workstation” is now used by PC suppliers for marketing purposes mainly.

The Zeus has one significant drawback for home use (and probably for office use, too) – its 80mm fan is rather too noisy. The competitor companies (for example, Enermax and FSP) and SilverStone itself offer power supplies that work quietly but have the same or even higher wattage (see the FSP Epsilon above).