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Written by Mikhail Ivanenkov
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Monday, 18 June 2007 |
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Page 2 of 3
The case is made of thick, heavy duty steel and the top is held in place by 4 screws. There's a "void warranty if removed" sticker covering one of these, so don't open your PSU unless absolutely have to. Popping the hood reveals a 120mm fan made by Yate Loon Electronics (model D12SM-12, the same brand found in several other power supplies). Two medium-sized winged heatsinks are present. Between them is a single large capacitor and transformer. On the left are more capacitors and the voltage lines. At the bottom right is the active PFC circuitry.
On the cable front, Seasonic doesn't disappoint. All of the cables are long enough to fit full towers and servers. This is also the first power supply I've seen where the individual wires in each of the cables are twisted together with pre-installed zip-ties every few inches. This preemptive cable management is something all manufacturers should strongly consider. It also makes a custom mesh mod a lot easier to accomplish (hint).
In terms of connectors, there are two cables with 3 x 4-pin molex and a floppy connector each, for a total of 6 x 4-pin molex and 2 x floppy connectors. The molex plugs have clips on either side which make installation (and particularly removal) a lot easier. Then there's another cable with 2 x SATA power connectors. There's also a PCI-E plug for that power-hungry video card. The ATX connector is the new 2.0 24-pin spec, but a 20-pin adapter is provided for older systems. A 12V P4 cable is also present. Last but not least there's a 3-pin tachometer wire that plugs into your motherboard for monitoring the PSU fan speed. This is more than enough to power even high end enthusiast systems.
Aside from the AC plug, 24 to 20-pin adapter, and Seasonic sticker, you also get a 4-pin molex connector which bridges off into 3 x 3-pin connectors. The yellow/black connector is labeled "H". When a fan is plugged into this, it runs at full speed (12V). The other two are labeled "L". When a fan is plugged into one of these, it'll run at a reduced speed (7V). This is the retail equivalent of the widespread 7V mod. Keep in mind that if you're trying to lower the speed of an extremely powerful fan (such as a high-spec Delta), it may be wiser to invest in a rheostat and start it up at full speed because given its high initial power draw it might not spin up at a lower voltage.
If the already twisted and zip-tied cables aren't enough, Seasonic included a Dr. Cable management kit. This consists of two clear tubes of split loom (one wide and one narrow), an adhesive cable mount, and lots of extra zip ties. While there's only enough loom to cover a pair of cables (as shown above), every little bit helps and this does allow you to customize your power supply if so desire. It would be nice to see a "special edition" S12, if you will, with all the cables already meshed, maybe even modular.
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 4.97V on the 5V line (only about 1% off) and 12.09V on the 12V line (also about 1% off). This is very impressive. The PowerAngel reported a power draw of 1.52A, 181VA, 179 watts, and a corresponding PF of 0.99. Efficiency was calculated to be around 77% (138/179). This is a bit shy of the 80% rating, but most power supplies increase in efficiency as the load increases and since this is only 138 watts, it's not a big surprise.
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Last Updated ( Monday, 18 June 2007 )
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