Efficiency plays an ever-increasingly important role in modern computers. Particularly with HTPCs designed to run constantly in living rooms, the high level of efficiency of the power supply ensures significantly lower electricity costs at the end of the year.
Overall, the Fortron power supply performed well. In the three load stages of the specification, the unit was constantly at over 84%. The best performance was obtained at below half load, where the efficiency increased to over 88%.
In our fictional system with a 250 watt load, the efficiency remained at a very good 87.7%, but in our low power system it only managed 76.3%.
In standby mode, with no load at all, the power supply only used 440 mW. With a standby load of just 2.5 W (500 mA at 5 V standby voltage) the Fortron converter drew 3.77 W from the socket, which is an efficiency of 65.5%.
The Zen 400 (PPA4000300) from Fortron (FSP) is available for a price of around $150.
Know of many HTPC boards that need an 8-pin CPU connection? :\ I sure don't.
If you have found a fanless PSU thats safe to touch -- thats great. but if these things get to 40, 50, 60c - then we need to know not to buy them.
I am quite interested in getting a capable (above 400watt) PSU that doesn't require a fan, but I really need to keep an eye on the temperatures.
I have a fanless mb and vid card (3850 radeon), and would wonder if adding a fanless psu into the mix would jeopardise the system by reducing the air flow through the case. (after all I wouldn't get a fanless PSU if my other components were noisy to begin with!?)
Perhaps an article focused more on configuring a quiet computer (for the purpose of gaming) could be in order?
this is not true you shouldn't have any equipment in recording area except for microphones and the band, so the recording occurs next door on whatever medium you use. also if you want to have silent recording station then it's probably cheaper just getting a silent laptop which will have enough power to record multiple channels easily
it's nice to have a silent PSU but at this price and low wattage eeek
Not everyone has the luxury of spare room to store noisy recording equipment in and reason for storing it in another room is due to noise so how is that not true? Yeah you'd need fan less psu, cpu, and video card plus a SSD or two ideally as well, but if you were getting a fan less psu chances are you'd want the other things as well anyway.
I use 120mm fans from Scythe, a Scythe CPU heatsink, a Thermalright GPU heatsink with a 92mm SilenX fan and a fanless PSU. The hard drives are in Logisys drive silencers. All fans are controlled by a manual Zalman fan controller (you certainly don't want to run them at max). Case rattle has been eliminated with a judicious application of duct tape.
Even though it is basically completely silent, the machine is certainly no slouch.
They claimed that the PSU had to shut down due to overheat. That never happens when it is touchable temperature so under full load it is a paws off.
Also the efficiency numbers should give a fair indication what the temperature will be considering the loss becomes heat. I wouldn't go so far to say it is a pointless review. Its easy to tell from the info they give whether its too warm or not. Its just to read between the lines.
It's for them SLI HTPC's. Don't you know???