CompuCase Tower Cases

Reviewed by James 06.23.2003

Power Supplies

The power supplies by no means look outstanding. The most distinctive feature on the 300W and 400W models are the translucent power supply fans. The 525W is more impressive. It has gold fan grilles (not that they look gold through the red window of the CI) and the cable wrap on the MB line.

Power Supply Specifications

Model:	300W	400W	525W
Pics
Fans	1 "ultra low noise ball bearing fan"	2	2
Connectors	1xMB, 1x12V, 1xAux, 2xfloppy, 5xP	1xMB, 1x12V, 1xAux, 2xfloppy, 8xP, 1xfan	1xMB, 1x12V, 1xAux, 2xfloppy, 8xP, 1xfan
Price	US$39.00	US$69.00	US$89.00

MB is theMotherboard Connector, 12V is the 2x2 (4 pin total) extra current connector,
Aux is the 6 pin Auxillory Power Connector, P is the 1x4 (4 pin total) peripheral power connector.
All models are compliant with the ATX12V standard.

The lengths of the runs on the 300W PS are 15" for the mainboard and the auxillory; 13" for the 2x2 12V; 13" for 1 peripheral(P) plus 6" more for the floppy; 13" for 1P, plus 6" more for another, and 6" more for the floppy; and then a last run of a 13" P with another 6" addition. The 400W's run lenghts are 20" for the mainboard and the auxillory, 18" for the 2x2 12V, 22" for 1P plus 8" for another, 8" for another, and then 8" for a floppy; that again but without a floppy; then yet another of those, but minus a peripheral plug; and finally a 29" mobo fan connector (2 wire, so no monitoring). The 525W comes with runs of 28" for the mainboard, the auxillory; and the 2x2 12V; and the peripheral, floppy, and fan runs are the same as on the 400W. Don't forget about the cable wrap on the 525W's mainboard cable:

Performance

While these power supplies have none of the glitz that you might find in more popular units, the performance would surely hold up to them, which is all we need from these oft-forgotten parts. The system they were tested in has an AMD XP 2000 ThBred rev. A, Asus A7V333, GeForce 4MX440, SB Audigy MP3+, 3Com 905C 10/100 NIC, Sony CD-RW 40x12x40, Samsung 16x DVD, and three hard drives, 2x40GB 7200RPM 2MB cache and 1x100GB 7200 RPM 2MB cache. To test, MBM was used to log the voltages while running a variety of tests: SETI for 20 minutes; Adobe with filters constantly applied to the same 20MB image for 20 minutes; heavy browsing with Mozilla 1.3 using tabs and multiple windows 20 minutes; DVD playback for 15 minutes; DivX playback for 15 minutes; and 15 minutes of idle time. All of the numbers were statistically insignificant from each other and from the expected value (within 3%).

However, this particular motherboard system setup has had significant issues with maintaining the -12V lead above -13.3V, consistently operating on the edge of safe voltages. Several other power supplies have been used in the past to test the validity of this occurance. These power supplies, however, acted differently. Well, the 300W did have problems, never going above -13.2V and remaining for the most part at -13.3V. The 400W and 500W units performed better maintaining average voltages of -12.7 and -12.6, max of -12.9 and -12.7, and min of -12.6 and -12.5, respectively. These results were quite surprising as they were so close to the expected value, which had never been attained before.