550W Roundup: Three PSUs at Different Prices
by Martin Kaffei on October 28, 2010 4:00 PM ESTTechsolo Black Mamba Internals
The internals consist of small heatsinks, a small transformer, and a big and noisy PFC-choke in the bottom right corner. The undersized bridge rectifier has no heatsink and the protective ground wire is connected to a mounting screw of the main PCB—bad idea! If an engineer or other employee disconnects the main PCB, there is no more ground contact.
There are four Y- and two X-caps as well as two current compensated coils in the EMI filtering stage, missing a MOV. Can you see the wire cross-section of phase and neutral conductor? It doesn't look like 550W. Things are looking black for our Black Mamba!
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Gonemad - Wednesday, November 3, 2010 - link
I had a Thermaltake ThoughPower (can't remember exact model) that performed fairly for 5 years. It operated non-stop for 1 year in-between that time. I bought it separately from a Thermaltake Case, that had several fans. Worth every dime, both of them.But...
I had to replace an original case fan, so I decided "what t'e hell' and slapped a cheap-o-dozen fan in its place. VERY. BAD. IDEA.
The whole thing worked fine for 6 months, then the ASUS metering software showed steady voltage dropping, curiously on the 3.3V rail as I later found out. Then it alarmed in an intermittent fashion, for no apparent reason, as it got to 10% Low Voltage on that rail.
Guess what? The fan LOCKED, and effectively pushed the PSU to 110% or above (who knows?), FOR FREAKING 6 MONTHS.
THE PSU DIDN´T QUIT ON ME.
As I opened it for regular maintenance (hey, 6 months, remember?) I found the locked fan, and a funny smell that could be felt only very near the PSU vent. You know the smell, don't you? That's the smell of a dying PSU. The fan almost burned my hand when I touched it, proving that the PSU was not at fault; in fact, it performed above and beyond any expectation, and possibly avoided a fire hazard. It was still operational when I removed it, but the smell was ever greater each time it was turned on, even for a few minutes, proving the whole thing had collapsed after all that operating time. The fan didn't short out, which would have triggered any safety (fuse, probably?) on the PSU, it just didn't rotate anymore on its bearings, and became a power drainer on the circuit, eating away the average life-time of the component.
The good PSU purchase decision not only proved a wise decision, it avoided me lots of hassle and grief. The cheap fan, on the other hand, destroyed a perfectly good piece of equipment.
"Caveat Emptor" indeed.
gurboura - Saturday, November 6, 2010 - link
It seems right from the start that you have something against TechSolo, you also talk about how it was loud at almost 30dbA, but yet, the Antec is at 32 and the OCZ tops at 26, still close to that 30dbA level."If you want to have a silent computer, please buy another power supply and protect your ears." Couldn't this have been said the same for the Antec since it was actually louder than the TechSolo?
When doing doing these type of articles your supposed to have an unbiased opinion and its pretty obvious from the start that that wasn't true.