That Yesico looks like a lot like variant of the Coolmax TaurusPSU. Very similar casing.

AFAIK, virtually all PC PSUs are made in Asia. Before, there was a lot of production in Taiwan, but now most of the factories are in China, althought the engineering and design seems to be still done in Taiwan. American and European brands buy OEM products from Taiwan & China.

If placed outside the case, a fanless PSU can usually run cool enough iof not it hot weather. Cables can reach if the case is not too big and the cablkes not too short. But it's an expensive way to do it...

Some advantages to fanless PSUs:

1) The low power systems you reference be pretty useful. Most home servers could likely get by with fanless PSUs paired with an VIA EPIA motherboard.

2) Users can treat the entire PSU assembly as just another component that needs some form of cooling. If designing a non standard form factor system (eg: PVR), one could streamline cooling, fanless or otherwise, to also hit the PSU. Or, as in the case of one commercially offered fanless PSU, one could more easily use water cooling components to cool the PSU.

3) While power users are generally comfortable tweaking their system fans, there is a certain degree a hesitation that enters the mind before one actually disassembles a PSU. And from personal experience, PSU capacitor discharges sting like none other!

That's because there's a grille on the 120mm fan. EMI can be (and is) blocked by a grille. Sorry, but your argument is invalid.

There is a pile of wires in the average atx psu loom to radiate noise, running the psu externally "could" cause trouble.


As for fanless psu's, running a phantom 500 outside my case has never been a problem, though with everything watercooled the case never warms up.


I'm building a HTPC at the moment and am going to try one of the short cicuit pw-200m psu cards with an external supply.

Things have moved on quite a bit since the last post in this thread, I have just ventured into fanless PSU territory via a Silver Power SP-S460FL, in an Antec Solo case, Phenom11 x4 955 BE, 2x2gb Performance DDR3 1333, passive Radeon 4350,
Samsung 128GB SSD. I have 2 120mm silent case fans and use an Arctic 7Pro rev2 CPU cooler.
I have run it for a week without the side of the case on, so the case fans are irrelevant for the moment, and it is neither negative nor positively pressured as it is. It runs very very cool. The CPU fan just twitches on idle, and whatever speed it does get up to under any load it remains silent. Very happy with it so far. I was fully prepared to invest some time and money into improving the cooling efficiency all round to cater for the fanless PSU but at this rate there is no point.
The Solo is a MK1 so the PSU is top mounted, which seems bad for heat gathering between it and the case top, but does not seem to happen. Temps checked on various software packages and all low, with similar results.
This is not a heavy use PC or overclocked, so that helps, and probably need a different set up if it had heavier loads demanded of it.

yes indeed, things have come a long way. i have a super flower golden silent (same as the reviewed kingwin stryker), a platinum 500w unit which actually does platinum at 600w as well. its also very cool, and should only have to dissipate ~10w at my load level, which is quite tame considering the size of the heatsinks the mosfets are attached to, and the 180mm fan underneath it. even at full load, there's very little heat and i dont think there will be any issue with longevity of capacitors or other components.

however, i dont think there is much point to fanless psus, even for silence enthusiasts. high end power supplies dont require very much air to keep temperatures in check, one example being the thermaltake toughpower 1275w platinum. it uses a ~60cfm yate loon, and, according to JG, only had a 4-5c rise in temps for most load levels. as such, a 400-500w fanless psu could get by with a 20-30cfm fan, such as a 800rpm slipstream or GT, which would be essentially silent unless you lived in an anechoic chamber.