The Basics (continued):

There are some small air vents on the front side of the power supply near the internal cabling. The bulk of the cables are not wrapped, and in fact only the motherboard power cable is wrapped. There is nothing protecting the cables from rubbing against the metal housing, but the metal has been rolled so the cables should not get cut.


Finally, let's take a look at the cables on this power supply. The motherboard power cable has a 20+4 connector, and as mentioned is the only one that is wrapped. The auxiliary power cable is a single 4-pin cable; there is no 8-pin option for the auxiliary power connector so on some motherboards this power supply may not work. There is one lead with four right angle SATA connectors. While this will provide power to up to four SATA devices, if one is an optical drive (typically placed at the top of the case) and then several hard drives are placed at the bottom of the case, the cable will not reach. Looking at the balance of drive cables, there are two leads with three 4-pin Molex connectors, with one of these leads also providing a floppy power connector. Finally, there are two 6-pin PCI-Express power cables.


Internal Examination:

By removing four screws the unit can be opened (and the warranty will be voided). The internal components of the power supply aren't particularly impressive looking (below left image). There are two fairly small heatsinks, but for a 500W unit they may work fine. Between the heatsinks is one transformer, and other than that the rest of the power supply internals are fairly boring. Turning to one of the sides, we can see where the cables exit the power supply chassis and that the metal has been rolled to avoid damaging the cables (above right image). The fan connects via a 2-pin connector on the left hand side in this view.


The below left image shows the opposite side of the power supply internals. Nothing too exciting here; there is a large capacitor and several other components. The plain black 140mm fan (see below right image) is labeled as being manufactured by Young Lin Tech, aka ShenZen. I was unable to find any published data on this fan, however I was unable to distinguish the fan inside my case over the loud fan on my eVGA 7900GTO.