Amacrox Calmer 560: Silence is Golden
by Christoph Katzer on April 2, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
Introduction
Amacrox might be not a familiar name to everyone, but the company just expanded its business over in Europe and should soon spread to the US as well. Most people in the PSU market know that Amacrox is actually a brand of the FSP group, which is the third largest power supply manufacturer worldwide. With Amacrox, the people at FSP wanted to create a brand that is actually "hip", whereas FSP is the more conservative brand. We already tested the Freestyle 750W in one of our roundups last year and found it performed quite well… until it failed. That certainly mars the impression, so we're here to look at a different PSU to find out if Amacrox can convey their message better this time..
With the Calmer 560, Amacrox has a fanless power supply with a 400W output. In 2006, we saw the Calmer and found it had very good efficiency and stable rails. Today we will be looking at the advanced model and hope that it can stick up to its predecessor. The Calmer 560 comes rated at 400W, but it has a peak output of 560W; hence the name. We will see in our tests if we can run safely at higher outputs and if the power supply can still deliver stable outputs at that level. The target market of this power supply is surely not enthusiasts with high-end graphics cards or SLI, but with 400W one can fire up most midrange systems with a dual-core CPU, a few hard drives, and a graphics cards with a single 6-pin PEG connector. Those looking to build a truly silent system should definitely have a look at this unit and our test results.
The label shows just 20A on the 3.3V rail and 14A on the 5V rail. Together they have a combined power of 130W, which will be definitely enough. This unit has two 12V rails, both rated at 14A. However, the second 12V rail has a higher peak output of 16.5A while the first has a peak output of 15A. Unfortunately, maximum combined power of the 12V rails is not listed, so we had to guess for our load calculations and settled on 300W.
Note: If you would like to know more about our testing methodology, equipment, and environment, please read our PSU testing overview.
We test an additional 10% above the highest load to see how the units perform with overload, both at room temperature and in a more stressful situation. To keep things somewhat reasonable we keep the ambient temperature at 50°C during the stress overload testing. Experience shows that many units can stand the overload at room temperature but will show problems with higher temperature and overload together. Only the best units will manage this without problems.
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sprockkets - Thursday, April 3, 2008 - link
Their Zen 300w power supply costs around $75, although expect to have more issues with them than their 12cm fan ones.Every so often, I wish someone would review POS power supplies. Just to see what they would do, and how easy they can destroy motherboards.
piroroadkill - Thursday, April 3, 2008 - link
And so, your wish is granted: http://www.jonnyguru.com/modules.php?name=NDReview...">http://www.jonnyguru.com/modules.php?name=NDReview...dkreviews - Wednesday, April 2, 2008 - link
If you are building HTPC and pick right components you can get away with fanless setup. I did just that for my HTPC setup and it wasn't a rocket science.I got Antec NKS2480 case with FSP Zen Fanless 400 watt PSU, Ninja Mini for CPU cooler and that's it! throw in hard drive and optical drive and you are all set. Antec case does come with 2x120mm fans that you can use, but it's not necessary.
My HTPC is on 24x7 and temps are as reported by SmartFan during movie watching. (idle temps are even lower)
Temp 1 38
Temp 2 38
Core 15C
Power consumption as reported by Kill A Watt:
Boot up 60-88 watt
Idle 65 watt
Non HD Movie 67 watt
dkreviews - Wednesday, April 2, 2008 - link
I guess I forgot to mention I use Gigabyte 780g mobo with AMD 2400 (45 watt)strikeback03 - Wednesday, April 2, 2008 - link
Why are PSU makers still including more Molex connectors than SATA? Now that the optical drives have finally gotten their act together and moved to SATA, the need for Molex is primarily legacy devices. Would be nice if the PSU reflected this and flipped the ratio of connector types to support SATA.Zolcos - Wednesday, April 2, 2008 - link
I have a lot of fans in my system, and exhausted my supply of fan mobo headers. Having a lot of molex connectors from the psu really helped out.Of course this situation doesn't mean a lot when we're talking about components designed for silence. But also consider that lots of people building a system just migrate optical drives from an old box. Not to mention that I needed to use pata optical drives in order to free up more sata ports, which are all in use now.
Molex is still king. In fact most people using sata just have a single sata hdd -- there isn't a huge market for having lots of sata power connectors. If you really have that many sata devices, you probably need a bigger psu than this one anyway.
Christoph Katzer - Wednesday, April 2, 2008 - link
I agree... sometimes there are still even more Molex than Sata connectors. I bought my first Sata DVD drive just a week ago, maybe there are still too many people with old stuff like me.HOOfan 1 - Wednesday, April 2, 2008 - link
The case it comes in appears to have better build quality than the PSU itselfSuper Nade - Wednesday, April 2, 2008 - link
It is better built than the FSP Epsilon and seems to be based on a different platform. The OEM is FSP (both the UL and the SPI on the transformers point to this).HOOfan 1 - Wednesday, April 2, 2008 - link
I am mostly talking about the exterior appearance. I figured it was FSP just based on the way they broke down the label.