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hardware tech site for the rest of us.
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CoolMax 470 watt Aluminum LED PSU Popping the cover open exposed two gold oversized heatsinks to keep things from getting too hot. The white you see on the larger of the two sinks is silicon thermal paste that got smeared there from when the heatsink sink was attached is my guess. Nice to see thermal paste but not smeared where its not supposed to be. Sloppy.
Each of the three cooling fans are made of clear plastic. Of the three fans inside the CoolMax, the rear exhaust sports three LEDs in a clear case fan. The blue, green, and red lights blend to really look sharp with on. Performance We decided to test our unit two ways. The first with the Hardware Monitor II program and the second with our trusty Radio Shack multimeter. Test Bed
Before we get into numbers, I wanted to take a second to explain what each of the voltages are for in some basic terms. The +12 volt line is for disk drives, fans, pretty much most if not all cooling gear you may use. The -12 volt line is generally for serial port components that are few and far between these days. The +5 volt line is for the motherboard and components. This brings us to of course the -5 volt line. It is a piece of history pretty much anymore unless you have some ISA stuff. Lastly, the +3.3 volt line is for your processor, since the move away from 5 volt for the CPU a while back. First the Hardware Monitor.
The +12 volt, +3.3 volt, and -5 volt lines showed less than 1% of variance and the +5 volt line only a bit over 2%. The -12 volt was 5.25% which is a bit much but remember this is not really used anymore on newer systems. Next, we whipped out our Multimeter to confirm our results.
Still within the original variance, even though the results were not identical. We are talking 2/100th and 4/100th differences here.
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All pages Copyright © 2000 - 2008
by R. Dean Barker.
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