Amacrox Calmer 560: Silence is Golden
by Christoph Katzer on April 2, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
Loads
As the results will show, there was no need to try for the peak 560W since the rails already experience problems at 110% of load - around 420W. It is possible to reach 560W, but we measured only around 3V at that time on the 3.3V rail and felt it wasn't worth showing. We decided to stay with the rated 400W and just went with a 10% overload, where the fanless design already struggled.
| Amacrox 560W Testing | |||||
| Load | 3.3V | 5V | 12V1 | 12V2 | Wattage All Rails |
| 10% | 1.70A | 1.19A | 1.15A | 1.07A | 40W |
| 20% | 3.40A | 2.38A | 2.30A | 2.14A | 80W |
| 50% | 8.50A | 5.95A | 5.76A | 5.35A | 195W |
| 80% | 13.59A | 9.52A | 9.22A | 8.56A | 310W |
| 100% | 16.99A | 11.90A | 11.52A | 10.70A | 390W |
| 110% | 18.69A | 13.08A | 12.67A | 11.77A | 420W |
As always, we used our Chroma ATE to apply a specific amount of load to all of the rails. The table above shows the different loads we used during testing.
DC Outputs
All of the rails start at their ideal output, which is good but doesn't leave much space for voltage drop with increasing loads. Normally we see power supplies start well above their nominal output, which leaves some wiggle room. This means that when we apply a heavy load the voltages drop dangerously close to being out of spec - and in the case of the 3.3V rail it falls out of spec above a 90% load. This is not a very good result if you actually plan on coming anywhere near the 400W rating, though the 12V and 5V rails do stay in spec even up to 10% overload. We also tried for the promised peak of 560W. Since the rails were already low, the extra load didn't help. We measured only 3V on the 3.3V rail at 560W.
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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.