New passive PSU: Magnum 500/600W

PSUs: The source of DC power for all components in the PC & often a big noise source.

Moderators: NeilBlanchard, Ralf Hutter, sthayashi, Lawrence Lee, Devonavar

Slaugh
Posts: 774
Joined: Thu Dec 02, 2004 2:27 am
Location: Quebec, Canada

Post by Slaugh » Mon Oct 31, 2005 10:57 pm

Talk about bad marketing! :shock:

I think we should move this thread to the "Consumer Advocacy / Feedback" forum, or at least copy it there...

BTW Mike, what are the other rules? :lol:

Evil Gnomes
Posts: 24
Joined: Tue Nov 01, 2005 12:40 am
Location: Sydney, Australia

Post by Evil Gnomes » Tue Nov 01, 2005 12:48 am

MGE isnt really known for good PSU's, they rebadge "YoungYear" PSU's, and the quality can be questionable.

Seasonic for the win!

oguzokay
Posts: 27
Joined: Thu Jan 12, 2006 5:42 pm

Post by oguzokay » Thu Jan 12, 2006 5:50 pm

Don't even think about it if you are in pursue of silent computing. I live in Turkey and ordered the XG Magnum 500 WATT from a US online retail shop. I have never been dissapointed this much with any other computer hardware I've bought in my life. It is by no means silent! It only runs silent for 15-20 minutes. (At an ambient temperature of 24 C and power usage peak of 96Watts -according to the LCD assembled to the uni-t) The fan starts rotating at 37 C and never stops again till you stop your computer. Instead it speeds up, getting louder and louder till it reaches to and an untolerable noise level. The fan used at this unit is a piece of trash. An Adda 80X80X15 is assemled to the unit. Even at the lowest RPM it produces an extremely annoying sound as its bearing mechanism is the worst I've ever seen. I first tought It was an electronic buzz coming from the coals. But then figured out clearly that It was sourced from the bearing mechanism of the fan. I was so annoyed and dissappointed that, I didn't hessitate to open the PSU cover to replace it's cheap fan with a Panaflo L1A. Guess what did I realize when I open the case? There's no way to fit a 80x80x25 mm fan to this PSU. Theres only room for a 80x80x15 mm fan. As you can appreciate, there are very few options in the market for 15 mm thin fans and they are very hard to find at all. Fan cables are directly soldered to the PSU . one of the major design flaws of the magnum is that, it's fan is placed in a direction to suck air from the case but there is a not enough ventilation hole to do this efficiently. In fact, only 1/4 of the fan dimension is behind the ventilation holes. 3/4 of the fan is actually blocked by so called"modular" power cable sockets. In other words, 3/4 of the fan falls directly behind the PSU casing where there is no ventilation holes at all!
The only reason I bought magnum was it's alleged silence. It is everything but silent! After seing the cheap fan I got completely mad and cut the cables and removed it. I thougt It would run stable under just 90-100 watts of power consumption since it had a passive design. After running it fanless a couple of hours, the external heatsink temperature reached 75 C. and PSU become totally unstable. Asus probe started alarming because 3.3, 5 and 12 volt rails were all out of threshold. Vcore started jumping between 1.3-1.44 volts. Finally
the OS became unstable aswell. Shortly, it is impossible to run the unit fanless even at very low voltage consumption levels. (90 watt is pretty low for a 500 Watt PSU!) I There was no choice but to plug back the extremely noisy stock fan to the PSU. Unfortunatly I sold my old psu before buying this piece of crap. Now I have a stylish yet untolarably noisy PSU
Another design flaw with the magnum is at its connectors. In Magnum's case modular design becomes a torture. All the connectors, including ATX, molex, PCI Ex are enclosed by a gigantic plastic It is virtually impossible to plug all the connectors to the PSU since they are interfering each other. They also interfere with IDE cables. For instance, there s no way to plug the 4 pin molex properly on a ASUS Dvd Writer because giganticly enclosed molex connector is obstructed by the IDE cable.
Before the Magnum, I was using a Zalman ZM 400 B It was far more better (in fact not even comparable in terms of silence) then the Magnum by any means.


PS: My system is as ffollows:
CM Stacker
ASUS P5WD2 Premium
P4 640
2 GB Corsair DDR II 533
ATI Radeon X850XT
Samsung 7200 RPM 200 GB
ASUS DVD Writer
1 * 12 CM Panaflo L1A case fan (7 volts)
CPU,GPU NB and HDD are watercooled passively by Innovatek

*Under full load it draws 170-176 Watts but I have experienced these issues when the system was idle and drawing no more then 90-95 watts

Poodle
Posts: 254
Joined: Fri Apr 01, 2005 3:17 am
Location: Gothenburg, Sweden.

Post by Poodle » Thu Jan 12, 2006 6:23 pm

Yeah. It seems to be a piece of crap. A friend of mine had one and it just... well... died one day... End of story.

plympton
Posts: 229
Joined: Sun Mar 14, 2004 11:40 am

Post by plympton » Thu Dec 27, 2007 11:20 am

Buy.com is selling these for $60 after rebate. I thought I'd ping this thread to raise awareness of other SPCR'ers whose interest was piqued by the low price and the flashy bling!

-Dan

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