Cabling

In the previous news, I suggested the FX500SE may have a modular cabling system, this fact has not been proven in the end. That means the information in the techPowerUp's Computex report has only been confusion. The power supply has completely fixed cabling and if I should start from a better end, the cabling is completely sleeved. But next to that, it does not comply with my requirements (czech only) for high-end: no connectors (with the exception of SATA but there it is part of the specification in my opinion) are gilded and the wires are not thick enough. That does not necessarily mean it is a problem, but… somehow it is not right.

The necessary conductor strength is dependent on the power which they will conduct of course, for example, a 400W PSU does not have to use 16AWG wires at all, but in the case of 500W PSU, I would compromise if at least some of them were thicker. But this is not the case, 18AWG wires  are used among the supply. At least that the 18AWG wires are used for both first and second PCIe connectors on the cable, but I would still rather see 16AWG wires from the supply to first connector and than maybe 18AWG from the first to the second one. As for the other cables, only the first connector has the luxury of 18AWG wires in each case, the other connectors share 20AWG wires. Here the FX500SE is going to loose some points. It could also surely use some clips for easy peripheral-molex unplugging.

Concretely, we have:

• Main ATX (20+40pin): 45 cm
• EPS 12 V (4+4pin): 61 cm
• PCIe (6+2pin): 46 cm
• PCIe (6pin): 55 cm
• 4× peripheral molex: 1× 75 cm, 2× 90 cm, 1× 104 cm
• 5× SATA: 2× 45 cm, 2× 60 cm, 1× 74 cm

The bloody thing does not have a floppy drive power connector! How am I supposed to power my good ol' floppy drive now?! Bloody hell… Worse problem from today's user's point of view may actually be the lack of PCIe connectors. I will not value this by points, I do not do this, cabling us clearly customer's individual choice. But I have been talking with Huntkey about this because in this state, it may not really find many buyers. With regard to nowadays CPUs with (in many cases) power consumption of literally couple of watts, in some cases it may be possible to allocate much over 400 W to graphics cards. The problem is, you may just not get it to them, two connectors are simply too few.

Power distribution is clearly stated on the image, the +12 V rails when combined can officially handle 100,8 % of the labeled power. That is what I call load balance! :-) I am going to evaluate this with extra half a point because I never seen this before. The rest is basically just to keep goodwill, but I would expect +3,3 and +5 V rails to handle at least 90 watts each. The supply has (almost automatically) only one output, +12 V, the rest is produced by DC-DC modules.

Exterior, cooling

Supply cover is made from ordinary 1mm Electrogalvanized Coated Cold roll (SECC) steel. It is eloxal coated with glaze black paint, in this case, scratched on several places and most likely "repaired" using alcohol marker. Maybe I got some wandering piece? It may even rode to the Computex itself :-) What I like is the output fan grill with big square holes. What I do not like is the cheap steel folding with some will on one side. This may cause the casing to resonate and vibrate. That's gonna be half a point down… The supply also lacks AC power switch.

The fan used is Yate Loon, commonly used by companies such as the FSP Group. This particular one is D12SL-12M which should run at 1350 RPM (top) with airflow of 47 CFM and noise of 28 dBA. This one will surely not be noisy compared to some competitive products with fans topping at even over 2000 RPM. Huntkey promises that up to approximately 50% load the fan should stay off so we will see how it ends during the load tests.