RaidMax 400 and 500 Watt PSU's

Installation

Before you decide to purchase one of these units, be sure to measure your case. These power supplies will not fit in all cases. If your case has a top mounted blowhole, the extra length added due to the externally mounted fan will cause problems. What I also ran into was that these units are a tad bit wider than other PSU's. They are actually too wide to fit in my Coolermaster ATC-201 case without some serious forcing, and I'm not about to do that. 

Testing

How do you test a power supply? Either it works or it doesn't, right? Not always. The real test of a PSU isn't whether or not it supplies enough power to start the computer, but whether or not it supplies constant power when under load. A spike in the lines can be devastating to not only your components such as HDD, CD-ROM but also to the CPU itself. To that end, I'll measure the power with the system under load for each PSU with as many devices hooked up as possible. 

Test System

• Asus P4S533 motherboard

• Intel P4 2.4GHz @ 2.53GHz

• Maxtor 20GB HDD

• Seagate Barracuda 30GB HDD

• Asus 52x CD-Rom

• X-Pider Thermal Monitor

• 4 80mm Case fans, 2 80mm LED fans, 1 Thermaltake SmartFanII

• Generic FDD

Since I'll be using the Asus board, I will use the Asus PC Probe to monitor the voltage as well as my handy-dandy voltage/amp meter. To put the system under load I'll run Folding@Home as well as SETI@Home and measure the voltages then. 

 

As you can see from the screen shots, the power supplies delivered very constant power to the computer. All the voltages were easily within acceptable limits. Also of significant note was that both of these power supplies were quieter than either my Enermax 431 or my Kingwin 450. 

Conclusion

Priced at $54 and $69 the Raidmax 400W and 500W power supplies are good bang for the the buck models. Both units deliver nice constant power and are reasonably quieter than other PSU's that I own. On the flip side is the fact that these units won't fit in all standard cases. Because of the externally mounted fan, if you have a top mounted blowhole it's highly unlikely that these will fit. So a word of caution to not make an impulsive purchase.  You WILL need to measure to be sure things will fit ok first.  We'd like to thank Raidtronics for the opportunity to review these products which are available for purchase at XPCases.

Pros:

• Price

• Steady power

• Quieter

• Aluminum construction

Cons:

• Externally mounted fan

• Size an issue as it won't fit all cases 

• Mislabeling of boxes ("Monitor AC Outlet") 

 

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