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FSP and Silverstone PSU Compared in Crossfire Stress Test

Cases & PSU/Power Supplies by geoffrey @ 2007-07-27

We take a look at two high wattage power supplies from companies known for their solid product lines; the Silverstone DA750 model features a single 12v rail and is rated at 750W. The FSP Epsilon has four 12v rails and combined offers up to 900W. We stress test these units in a real world environment with the most power hungry vga cards out there, two ATI HD 2900 XT in Crossfire. Read on to find out if they pass our tests

FSP Epsilon 900: inside the box & details

FSP Epsilon 900: inside the box

The FSP box packs the following goodies:

FSP Epsilon 900 PSU
power cable
tie wraps
4 thumbscrews (to tighten the PSU inside your pc housing)
FPS case badge
manual

FSP Epsilon 900: details

Just like with Silverstone's PSU we found a grill filling up the entire back side of the back, airflow is not restricted by the housing in any way. The usual power connector and on/off switch can also be found here, but do note the large 120mm fan on top of our picture, FSP's solution to keep their product running at reasonable temperature.

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All other sides of the housing are closed except for a few holes so that hot air can be extracted easier in order to provide extra cooling on critical components.

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900W continuous power divided over 7 different volt rails, unbelievable what people can stack in such a small housing. The downside of all those differently transformed volt lines is that we do not really have any 12V line which can provide over 20A or 240W, could that become a problem once one of our components is being madly overclocked?

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An overview of how the connectors look like:

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The PSU itself looked rather empty inside. Multiple small volt rails makes it easier to cool the switching transistors, the smaller heatsink can safe up quite some space. Though, the amount of components seem to be held as low as possible too, and I must say that I didn't feel quite confident that this PSU could really feed up to 900 Watts because there just doesn't seem to be put much effort in the finishing of this product. Also note how on the left side down to the bottom you can see some inscriptions which point out the amount of power this product is rated for. This indicates that the PCB design is kept the same for many different products, even low-power ones, and that we might have to deal with a product which is rather designed for fast/cheap production instead of great quality.

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Specifications? We compare both PSU's on next page, which one will come out best? Read on ->

Comment from MTBF @ 2010/03/10

FORTRON / FSP Power Supply Units are unreliable hardware devices.
Failed just after 784 days of normal use (about 3500 hours only)!.

Comment from jmke @ 2010/03/10

MTBF doesn't guarantee you a minimum life-time expectancy FYI

Comment from MTBF @ 2010/03/10

Yes, 2 years but warranty was over since 1,5 month only.

Comment from jmke @ 2010/03/10

how many FSP PSU do you own?

Comment from MTBF @ 2010/03/10

Just one, Epsilon 700w definitively useless by now also it was properly protected with an UPS.
Such material is normally designed for 100,000 hours.

Comment from jmke @ 2010/03/10

Quote:

Such material is normally designed for 100,000 hours.

no, it has MTBF of 100.000 hours. And MTBF != LifeTime

Quote:

nother common misconception about the MTBF is that it specifies the time (on average) when the probability of failure equals the probability of not having a failure (i.e. a reliability of 50%). This is only true for certain symmetric distributions. In many cases, such as the (non-symmetric) exponential distribution, this is not the case. In particular, for an exponential failure distribution, the probability that an item will fail at or before the MTBF is approximately 0.63 (i.e. the reliability at the MTBF is 37%). For typical distributions with some variance, MTBF only represents a top-level aggregate statistic, and thus is not suitable for predicting specific time to failure, the uncertainty arising from the variability in the time-to-failure distribution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_ti...sconcepti ons

you can't decide on experience with ONE sample that a whole range of products is broken/bad.

Comment from MTBF @ 2010/03/10

I agree with you and the above MTBF but when you pay US$200 for a device you don't expect that you should do it again 2 years later... :-)
Especially when the breakdown is obviously the device itself.

Comment from jmke @ 2010/03/10

I've had laptops break down a week after their warranty has expired, sometimes you get the short end of the stick

the other 200 laptops kept working years after their warranty expired.... that's life

Comment from EsaT @ 2010/03/24

Quote:

Originally Posted by jmke

you can't decide on experience with ONE sample that a whole range of products is broken/bad.

Epsilon platform based PSUs commonly show "ripple happiness" from the start (even some advertised PSU specs breaking ATX specification) and FSP uses mostly cheap capacitors avoided by many makers.
So with such product propability of getting that short end of the stick is simply higher.

Comment from ToyTen @ 2010/04/01

I am a lucky owner of an 800w Epsilon PSU then. Since the Geforce 8800GTX and I used those in SLI with a Q600 for more than one year. My PSU is still there.
Not saying at all that problems never occur of course, but it seemed to me that a positive feedback about those PSU's was welcome here, supplying a 5870 and an I7 950 @ 3200Mhz with 4Ghz UCLK, 3 HDD and 6Gigs of memory. Also lots of fan for my water cooling.

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