Trial By Fire
I decided that three loosely-fitted capacitors were not worth leaving the power supply on the bench, so I decided to proceed with the somewhat tedious task of putting the Aria's original power supply back in. I can always defer installing properly-fitting capacitors until I have some other reason to take the Aria apart again, although I am seriously considering just leaving it that way to spare myself the hassle.
Just about everything seems to get into everything else's way while re-assembling the case. The drive cage catches the FireWire cable and connector on my Audigy 2. The HDD's fragile SATA connector brushes against the power supply housing. I actually broke the PSU's original SATA power plug and had to splice new ones in years ago because of this. The first AMP (“Molex”) connector on each of the three cables is too close to the power supply to do any good. And cables get pinched between the HDD or drive tray and the DIMMs, CPU fan, cards, or between the drive tray and chassis. As if having one side of the heat sink blocked off by the side panel was not bad enough, the power supply cables exit down the trench between the GPU and CPU, blocking off most of the stock Socket 478 heat sink's inward-facing side and obstructing airflow across the northbridge. There is also an annoying bracket over the power supply and across the top of the case that makes installing and removing the power supply far more inconvenient than it needs to be.
The Aria may have been cute, and it still is. But I believe it may also have been one of the worst cases of its day to work with. If it had been even only one centimeter taller to increase clearance between the PSU, drive tray and motherboard components, one centimeter wider to put some distance between the CPU heat sink and the side panel, and one centimeter deeper to increase clearance behind the drive tray, it would have been much nicer to work with.
At any rate, all of the outputs look right on the mark except for 3.3V, which is slightly on the high side at 3.4V, and there is no obvious sign of noise being an issue. If I get my hands on a couple of programmable loads or get around to building my own, I may revisit my inventory of old power supplies and give them a little workout.
With the computer booted, its power supply draws 97.5W from the wall with a nearly ideal power factor of 0.98. Not bad considering that APFC was a new requirement in most countries back then, and most countries' PFC requirement is still only 0.9 today.