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Aopen 300Watt PSU - The Modded Version

Cases & PSU/Power Supplies by piotke @ 2003-12-08

Last week I got a call from a friend. His PSU was too loud, so I planned to do something about it.
I went to the local hardware shop, and they pointed me towards an Aopen 300Watt PSU. (FSP300-60PN) Sounds like an ordinary PSU ? Take a look at what I got !

Test system and stabilty

Test setup

Piotkes rig !
CPU	AMD Athlon XP 1800+ "DLT3C"
Mainboard	Abit NF7-s Rev 2.0
Cooling	Thermalright SLK800 + 80 mm fan
Memory	2 * 256 Mb pc3200 TwinMos "50B" chips
Video	Albatron Geforce 4 MX480 64 DDR
Hard Disk #1	Seagate Cuda 4 40 gig
Hard Disk #2	Maxtor 200 Gig 7200 rpm 8Mb
Fans / Extra's	1*80 mm case fan Enermax, at lowest rpm

"Benching"

To test the stability I stressed all components of my system at the same time, and monitored the fluctuations of the different voltage rails.
To stress all components I used following tools:

3DMark 2001 SE

Windows defragmentation tool

Now my CPU, VGA card and hard disk were under load.

In the shop, they said the PSU could be compared with a Chieftec PSU. Well, lucky me, I've got a 360Watt Chieftec PSU, lets check it out!

Check the MBM high/low file for the results:

AOpen 300 watt

Madshrimps (c)

What does this mean? If we look at the averages we see that the 5 V line is stable, with an average of 4.98 V. And it stays stable during the stress tests. The difference between the highest and lowest peak is only 0.03V. Negligible!
The 12 V line on the other not really bad, average of 1.82, but while stressing all components and consuming more power, the line drops to 11.73. Here the difference between highest and lowest peak is 0.2 V already. No disaster, but not perfect. :)

Chieftec 360 watt

Madshrimps (c)

I've thrown in this Chieftec PSU for comparison. What can we see here? While the AOpen never topped over + 5 V, the Chieftec never drops below 5 V. The 12 V line is almost the same, only the difference between lowest and highest value is bigger. But still no disaster...

So, I could say that both PSU's are an equal performer on my system. Too bad I don't have a very heavy VGA card, so that I could stress the PSU's better...

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