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Written by Mikhail Ivanenkov
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Monday, 18 June 2007 |
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Page 2 of 3
Popping the hood reveals a few interesting things. First and foremost, the entire top sheet of mesh is covered by a secondary plastic sheet (with a cutout for the intake fan of course). What this means is that you shouldn't expect any ventilation from this mesh - all of the airflow comes from the honeycomb front grill and the intake fan. I assume this was done to prevent shorting between the various electrical components inside. This doesn't completely destroy the concept of the mesh thought - its other purpose is to create a lighting effect courtesy of the LED fans. The components include a couple decent-sized ribbed heatsinks, a large transformer, and a pair of large capacitors. The overall weight is "mid-range".
On the connector front there's not much to get excited about. There's the typical ATX cable, 4 x 4-pin molex connectors, a floppy plug, one SATA cable, 12V P4 connector, and a nearly useless server motherboard connector. There are a few zip ties here and there. All of the cables are pretty short, so don't expect to use this in a full tower. The number of connectors (or lack thereof) is a bit disappointing when talking about a "500 watt", theoretically high end power supply.
There is however one very clever connector that all manufacturers should consider integrating. Since this is an ATX 2.0 spec model, a 24-pin connector is needed. Rather than having one by default and providing an add-on 20-pin connector, Logisys did the exact opposite. Here we have an older 20-pin plug with a separate 4-pin connector. This connector slides into the side of the 20-pin one in effect creating a 24-pin connector. Doing so eliminates extraneous wiring that can be quite unsightly on modded power supplies (particularly those with all the cables meshed).
At night the blue LED fans give off a nice glow throughout the entire PSU as can be seen above. The mesh does a good job of dispersing light so it looks like the entire unit is illuminated, not just a couple sections. This is primarily what the mesh is for. The fans themselves are medium-low output models so it's not the quietest power supply out there, but it's not loud either. It would have been nice to see a slower spinning 120mm fan as an intake instead (like the one in Seasonic's S12).
Two sets of tests were run. The first is a bit synthetic. Here a calibrated 138 watt loader was used. Power monitoring was done using both a Radio Shack digital multimeter and Seasonic's PowerAngel. Given this load, the multimeter reported 5.03V on the 5V line (only about 1% off) and 12.28V on the 12V line (about 2.3% off). Pretty stable rails. The PowerAngel reported a power draw of 2.41A, 287VA, 194 watts, and a corresponding PF of 0.67. Efficiency was calculated to be around 71% (138/194). A 71% efficiency is low by today's standards, especially since this is a passive PFC model (active PFC models usually tend to have a lower efficiency). Not impressive.
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Last Updated ( Monday, 18 June 2007 )
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