Enter our December 2007 Giveaway! We're giving away 14 prizes worth several hundred bucks! Enter HERE.
Statistics
Visitors: 942190
| Antec TruePower 550watt PSU |
|
|
|
| Written by Alexandru Spataru | |
| Monday, 18 June 2007 | |
|
Page 5 of 6
The fan is made by Top Motor and uses a ball bearing mechanism, thus the low noise even at full speed. Rated about 2000RPM and 38CFM max (that is if I got the right specs from Top Motor's site), it provides a good amount of intake air for cooling the PSU. The second fan is for hot air exhaust and measures 80x80x25mm. Unfortunately it was unavailable for the photo session because it was impossible to remove from the PSU.
I'll give you a small tip: when choosing a PSU, you can also judge the quality of that PSU by how heavy it is. Heavy PSUs are usually high quality, because they have a lot of heatsinks and other components inside that make it heavy, while cheap PSUs are very light. The Antec TruePower 550W is quite heavy; it weights almost 2.3Kg.The reason why it's so heavy is the parts inside. There are lots of large capacitors, large heatsinks and almost everything is made of aluminum (the heatsinks) or copper (wires and stuff).
I've been looking everywhere for the +5V line origin on the PCB but it was well hidden under the heatsink, where it seems that all red cables start from there. Unfortunately there are no potentiometers for controlling the voltage on the lines, or at least I haven't seen any and I've looked really hard. Not that the potentiometers are really needed, but they would give the user more control over the PSU. Also, in the picture above there's a yellow cable that does start at the +12V line, but takes a detour to the big white thingy attached to the heatsink. That big white thingy is a thermistor, which is basically a resistor that varies with temperature, and it controls the voltage on that +12V cable based on the temperature of the heatsink that it is attached to. This is the secret behind the Low Noise Technology, and this is how the PSU fans and the case fan that you attach to the "Fan only" connectors are controlled. |
|
| Last Updated ( Wednesday, 27 June 2007 ) |
