SPCR

Does it work well (fit) in the P182 case?

krille wrote:Does it work well (fit) in the P182 case?

Yes, but not if you try to use the fan in the middle. It works better if you remove the fan mount -- just drill out or chisel off the rivets.

MikeC wrote:

krille wrote:Does it work well (fit) in the P182 case?

Yes, but not if you try to use the fan in the middle. It works better if you remove the fan mount -- just drill out or chisel off the rivets.

Ah, it would take the P183 to have such a long PSU and a fan in the lower chamber then?

A VelociRaptor (or other HDD) should get sufficient cooling in the lower drive bay even without a fan, correct?

As long as the ambient temp isn't too high, and you're not packing drives together or heavily loading them, most drives will be fine with minimal airflow. Laptop drives almost certainly will require no airflow. However, 10k drives may require a little more (the only ones I have are 3.5" SCSI drives in a server, where they stay quite cool.. but noisy).

You could probably get away with a slow 80mm fan just blowing at the drive from above or underneath (or in front if you're hanging it without the heatsink), if it needs it.

Monkeh16 wrote:As long as the ambient temp isn't too high, and you're not packing drives together or heavily loading them, most drives will be fine with minimal airflow. Laptop drives almost certainly will require no airflow. However, 10k drives may require a little more (the only ones I have are 3.5" SCSI drives in a server, where they stay quite cool.. but noisy).

You could probably get away with a slow 80mm fan just blowing at the drive from above or underneath (or in front if you're hanging it without the heatsink), if it needs it.

You don't need additional cooling with the VR. I have it running in a very low airflow setup, no fan in front -- 40C most all the time. 4W idle, 6W max... it's trivial.

MikeC wrote:

Monkeh16 wrote:As long as the ambient temp isn't too high, and you're not packing drives together or heavily loading them, most drives will be fine with minimal airflow. Laptop drives almost certainly will require no airflow. However, 10k drives may require a little more (the only ones I have are 3.5" SCSI drives in a server, where they stay quite cool.. but noisy).

You could probably get away with a slow 80mm fan just blowing at the drive from above or underneath (or in front if you're hanging it without the heatsink), if it needs it.

You don't need additional cooling with the VR. I have it running in a very low airflow setup, no fan in front -- 40C most all the time. 4W idle, 6W max... it's trivial.

As I thought, little different to a 3.5" 7200. I wouldn't try building a RAID-1 with them with that little airflow though.

Is the 750W considerably louder? It has a 120mm fan and only 1 heatpipe.

The 850 costs a lot more for being only 100W more, but its also a lot more attractive and the innards look to be of higher quality.

Argh, I just cant call myself sane spending $180 on a darned power supply.

aSASa wrote:Is the 750W considerably louder? It has a 120mm fan and only 1 heatpipe.

The 850 costs a lot more for being only 100W more, but its also a lot more attractive and the innards look to be of higher quality.

Argh, I just cant call myself sane spending $180 on a darned power supply.

850 is manufactured by a different company- totally different ballgame.

$180 on a PSU is downright reasonable when put into perspective with the rest of your system (presumably), and absolutely pales in comparison to the cost of a particularly quiet H2O system.

Hello MikeC.

I believe there is another typo in this review.

On the 4th page, the 3rd row of the table named:

OUTPUT, VOLTAGE REGULATION & EFFICIENCY: Zalman ZM1000-HP

the last three records currently report these data:

Total DC Output: 91w

AC Input: 152w

Calculated Efficiency: 80.3%

Well, I guess that 91w aren't actually the 80.3% of 152w.

Cheers,
Luca

warriorpoet wrote:

aSASa wrote:Is the 750W considerably louder? It has a 120mm fan and only 1 heatpipe.

The 850 costs a lot more for being only 100W more, but its also a lot more attractive and the innards look to be of higher quality.

Argh, I just cant call myself sane spending $180 on a darned power supply.

850 is manufactured by a different company- totally different ballgame.

$180 on a PSU is downright reasonable when put into perspective with the rest of your system (presumably), and absolutely pales in comparison to the cost of a particularly quiet H2O system.

I'd also like to know more about the 750 version, Zalman ZM750-HP 750W. How it compares to the 850 and 1000, especially regarding efficiency and noise.

I definitely don't need 1000 and 850 is still pushing it. 750 is plenty, but affordable and will be enough for a lot of people. Any chance it will be reviewed?

erikswe wrote: I definitely don't need 1000 and 850 is still pushing it. 750 is plenty, but affordable and will be enough for a lot of people. Any chance it will be reviewed?

I think that even 750W is INSANE-OMG-WTF overkill for the vast, vast, vast, vast majority of people.

BIG WARNING to everyone thinking about buying this psu. It suffers from an extremely annoying coil whining issue. I've heard that also the lower watt versions of this power supply have the same issues. Here's two videos of it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQa79pWC0OQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZU9JKCdCVg

As you can see, the psu produces these screeching/whining loud electrical noises anytime you put it under any type of load (this also applies to harddrive usage, so forget about downloading while you sleep lol).
You can actually hear this spiking sound each time it writes from cache to disk when youre downloading. Download fast enough and the screaming is about constant, just like in this video. This turns out to be some kind of manufacturing fault.
Not what you'd expect from a so called "silent" power supply, is it?

As if that wasn't bad enough. I've been in contact with their US-support regarding this issue for a period of over 4 months now. And all I get is postponing replies, replies that try to redirect me to the european support (that hasn't replied to ONE of my twenty emails sent over the same period of time) or periodical "we forwarded this to our boss" with absolutely no replies weeks after.

So, not only have I had to endure this coil squealing non-stop for 4 months, their support is virtually non-existent too.
One would think that a relatively small issue like this could be handled within days. And that they would attempt to deal with the root cause of whatever manufacturing issue they're having.

All in all, i want this very important issue to become more well known. Maybe you could even add it as a side note to your review so that other people won't fall in the same trap that I did.

If you have any tips on how I should proceed with this issue from here, I'd be thankful. Seems like a dead end when months have passed without anything happening. Feels like they're indirectly denying me my warranty.

I just purchased an 850w yesterday after my Zippy PSL6701 (modded with a quiet fan) blew up at a Lan due to dodgy power grounding that killed a few other pc's

Anyway, the 850w has gone into a system with interesting specs, it has 14x Samsung 750gb hdd's, 2x seagate 80gb 7200.9, 1x Seagate 7200.12, 1x optical drive, an E8400 cpu, 4gb ram, a Gigabyte P45 motherboard, 2x Intel SAS raid cards, an 8600GT graphics card and about 10 fans. No it isn't quiet but I do go to SPCR regularly because I enjoy the power supply reviews.

The one thing that concerned me is that while I'm loading up the 12v1,2,5 and 6 rails I don't actually know what transformers they are pulling from. There are two big transformers in the unit. In effect it has two rails that are split into 3 lines with OCP on each of those three lines.

What I'm guessing is that the pair of pcie connectors built in and the pair of pcie connectors are on different transformers. IE the two built in have one on 3 and one on 4. This in turn is coming from the two transformers. In turn the two modular pcie connectors on 5 and 6 are also going to be on one transformer each, so the sata and molex connectors are on different transformers, and in turn I'd suspect that 12v1 and 12v2 are on different transformers as well.

So my final guess is that 12v1,3,5 are on one transformer and 12v2,4,6 are on the other. It would be great if someone at Zalman could confirm this but I doubt I'll get a reply.



Peter - perhaps yours in faulty, mine doesn't make that noise at all and I'm sure if it was a common problem other people would make mention of it too

bradc: I think you graphics card isn't straining the PSU in the same way as mine does (GTX 285). The squealing/whining seems to happen with newer graphics cards. So I would think twice before I got this psu if I'm having any thoughts at all on a future graphics card upgrade.

Also you might wanna check out this thread (regarding the 850w model): http://3dgameman.com/forums/showthread.php?p=714321

The user bejohnson gives some pretty good explanations on how and why this occurs. http://3dgameman.com/forums/showpost.ph ... ostcount=4

Sorry for the late reply. I also own an i7 975EE and a GTX275 in my gaming PC. It has an Enermax 701AX in it which I just had lying around. I still haven't made up my decision about what the permanent power supply will be in that pc yet.

Anyway, the computer emits quite a loud squeal, especially when booting up. I've had the PSU for a number of years now and have NEVER heard that noise before. I'm not sure if it is the card or the psu though. Unfortunately it isn't easy for me to swap in the graphics card into the server at all, otherwise I'd try it. I might pull the graphics card out and put it into my general use PC and see what happens.

Bump from the depths!

I now own two of these PSU's as I simply couldn't find anything better out there. The new Corsair AX1200 is a stunning unit but I don't need something rated anywhere near that high.

I spent hours the other day researching and ended up buying another one simply because I couldn't find anything better. I wanted 4x PCIe power connectors, the ability to comfortably sustain 600w (ie I wanted an 800w plus unit) and something fairly quiet, and the Zalman was still right up at the top of what I could find out there.

My server is the same as back one year ago but it now has 6x 1.5tb greens replacing 6x 750gb samsungs.


My games PC is still a 975EE and the same graphics card. It has 6 hdd's and a SAS raid card. The Zalman powers this PC perfectly silently too. I'm considering getting a gtx480 soon, we will see what happens with one of those installed