2003 Power Supply Roundup Part II: Better Faster Cheaper
by Kristopher Kubicki on July 31, 2003 1:58 PM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
We praised the TruePower in our last review because it abided by two fundamental rules; it was efficient and it was cheap. Antec is large enough to grab good prices from their component makers and thus relay the savings down to their consumers, without sacrificing quality. Let us hope during the benchmarking of this unit that Antec continues to follow those same rules. To balance Antec’s representation, we also obtained a TruePower 330W for the roundup.
The TruePower 330W is a relatively no thrills power supply, especially when compared to Antec’s 550W TrueControl. It does come with the standard motherboard monitoring, and the two dedicated fan molexes (controlled automatically by the power supply). However, we are fairly hesitant to use these. The power supply is tucked into its own corner of the case, so we really do not want temperature changes inside the power supply to affect the fan control elsewhere in the case.
Wattages
|
|
3.3V |
5V |
12V |
-12 |
-5 |
+5vsb |
combined theoretical |
actual combined |
advertised total |
|
Antec TruePower 330 |
92.40 |
150.00 |
204.00 |
12.00 |
2.50 |
10.00 |
- |
- |
330.00 |
The TruePower still produces a respectable amount of power on each rail, but not a lot of power on the +12V. The dedicated +3.3V rail will benefit AMD users, particularly overclockers; but beware of the extremely modest +12V rail. If you are running a high end video card, or an Intel Pentium 4, this power supply simply will not produce enough juice.
The TruePower 330W is priced around $55, which puts it just a couple bucks under its TruePower 430W cousin. In our opinion, it would be more cost effective to get the 430W TruePower, which also won our roundup a few months ago.
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Anonymous User - Friday, August 1, 2003 - link
1. No amp measurements were listed, a serious deficiency because without them there is no way to know how well each PS met its amp specs, and many brands are known to fall short.2. No overload testing results for shorts, excessive power draw, excessive temperature.
3. Ripple is not just slow voltage variation also short term variation, such as for each AC cycle (60 Hz for the incoming AC, about 60,000 Hz for the output DC). I would have liked to see how the latter correlated with the memory noise test results.
4. I hope you were careful when you tested the PS heatsink temperatures because some heatsinks are live with high voltage.
Anonymous User - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
Well for the observent people who can differentiate between orange and blue, its not an issue. Also waiting a full second before clicking it reveals the location on both the bottom left and the mouse cursor. but i can see how it does get annoying.Anonymous User - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
yeah those in page advertisements are REALLY annoying...those have got to go. i never know when i'm going to link to another anandtech article or to an ad...i guess that's the point but it's still unacceptableAnonymous User - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
I would like to see the review include a Heroichi Electronic power supply, I hear they are very good but I haven't used one.Anonymous User - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
Some of your "In Page Advertising" links seem to be missing closing links tags or something so that it results in having a <link> in the middle or end of a sentence. Ex. "We had a lot of troubles with Vantec’s last power supply, the Stealth. We found an error in the production label<link>, which quickly led to a change in all the labeling on all Stealth power supplies."KristopherKubicki - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
#3 and #4, thank you for spotting these errors. I have updated and fixed them.Cheers,
Kristopher
Anonymous User - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
I hope the ripple for the PC Power & Cooling 3V wasn't 2.295.. Possibly 3.296??? 1 volt drop is unacceptable.Anonymous User - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
The REAL price of the pc power&coolinghttp://www.directron.com/pcpower.htmlAnonymous User - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
a little more content per page in some cases would be nice too......but good to see content on the site at all...and seemingly more regularly too...
Anonymous User - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
woah guys, the tables need some work...