Seasonic S12-430 - experience after one day

[chump]

Delurking...

Yesterday I received the S12-430 I ordered from Newegg as a replacement for my modded 350W Enermax Whisper that died after 4 years.

I have to say this power supply is the quietest I've ever heard. I'm very impressed. The voltage on my 12v and 5v rails is slightly low, but within spec, so I'm going to keep an eye on that. My system is a KG7 Raid mobo with Athlon XP 1900+ and 512MB and a Radeon 7000 running with 1 case fan, 3 HDDs, 1 DVD/CD ROM, 1 DVD Writer, and a firewire card.

Here's what I get with Speedfan:

3.3v: 3.42v
5v: 4.88v
12v: 11.87v

The good thing is that these voltages are rock solid. They just don't move.

One last bit of info. The placement of the on/off rocker switch was a slight problem for me during installation. I have one of the older Palo Alto steel/plastic tower cases that Dell and Micron used to use. There's an integral steel "crossbar" that runs through the power supply area and connects the top of the case to the bottom part below the power supply. The layout of most power supplies has the fan on one side of this crossbar and the power switch on the other side with plenty of clearance. With the S12-430, half of the power switch falls under this crossbar, and this holds the switch in a centered position so it is neither on nor off.

Fortunately, I was able to bend and hammer out the crossbar so there's enough clearance under it to allow the rocker switch room to fully move to the on and off positions. This was kind of a pain because I didn't want to take a chance with my drives, so I removed them all before I started hammering. I suppose it would have been easier to just snip off the crossbar completely, but I didn't want to mess with the structural integrity of the case.

[ilh]

Don't judge power supply rails by the BIOS, Speedfan, MBM, etc. My rails "read" 11.71, 4.91, 3.21 using such software. Checking with a digital multimeter they read 12.01, 4.98, and 3.301 at load. I trust a Fluke DMM more than some $0.50 chip on the motherboard.

Glad to hear you like your S12.

[m0002a]

I have a S12-380 and all my voltages are within tolerance except the +12V, which shows 11.03 on the bios (-12V is 12.19). But testing with a multi-meter on one of the 12V peripheral power cables, it shows 12.01V.

I assume that I have nothing to worry about. Comments?

[Tiamat]

As above said, your multimeter is going to be much more accurate than what the mobo could ever tell ya. If your multimeter starts telling you 11.01 volts for 12V, then you start worrying.

[Mr_Smartepants]

Delurking...

Well then let me be the first to say...
Welcome to SPCR!

I concur with the others. Don't trust your BIOS readings, a multimeter is much more accurate.

[m0002a]

As above said, your multimeter is going to be much more accurate than what the mobo could ever tell ya. If your multimeter starts telling you 11.01 volts for 12V, then you start worrying.

I wasn't sure if the s12-380 had different rails for the peripherals and the motherboard? I only measured the peripheral power cable voltage (I don't know how to measure motherboard voltage).

[chump]

Delurking...

Well then let me be the first to say...
Welcome to SPCR!

I concur with the others. Don't trust your BIOS readings, a multimeter is much more accurate.

Thanks...

I'll check with a multimeter soon.

By way of comparison, when I recently started having POST trouble and random lockups after successful boots, my Enermax BIOS readings were 3.41, 4.41, and 11.65. When I first got the Enermax four years ago, the BIOS readings were 3.41, 4.85, and 12.21, which are very close (except for the +12v) to my initial S12 BIOS readings...

[MikeC]

By way of comparison, when I recently started having POST trouble and random lockups after successful boots, my Enermax BIOS readings were 3.41, 4.41, and 11.65. When I first got the Enermax four years ago, the BIOS readings were 3.41, 4.85, and 12.21, which are very close (except for the +12v) to my initial S12 BIOS readings...

And this is the same motherboard?

[chump]

Yes, same motherboard -- an Abit KG7 Raid. The only difference between my system then and now (aside from the obvious new S12) are that I swapped my CD writer for a DVD writer, and I added one more 80MB hard drive and a firewire card that only gets used for iPod transfers.

Edit: Forgot that one more difference is that I upgraded my processor from a 1.4 GHz Thunderbird to an Athlon XP 1900+ about two years ago.

[dfrost]

Here's another set of S12-430 initial observations, replacing an Antec Sonata TP380S.

Very nice quality and instructions. Bundle is nice, but the split cable tube is much bulkier and harder to manuever then the Antec braided cable cover. I did a slightly better job of cable routing then I had the first (ever) time. The PSU fan sensor wire was just long enough to reach the poorly placed Sys Fan header on the AI7 mobo, so I can finally see the fan speed in Abit's uGuru.

Extremely quiet - makes me want to get that VF-700 to replace the whinny VGA fan sooner then next month's birthday! Fan hasn't gone over 780 rpm yet. PSU exhaust air is much cooler then the TP380S's and lower in velocity.

Voltages as indicated by uGuru have been very steady at:

3.3V: 3.28 indicated
5V: 5.16 indicated (actually on the high end of the tolerance band)
12V: 12.10 indicated

With the TP380S, temperatures had always been pretty good for a (Northwoods) Pentium:

CPU, System, PWM idle/load:
33/45, 29/31, 36/50

The initial surprise with the S12 PSU was that temps were 6-10C higher then they had been:

39/53, 35/38, 45/60

HDD temps also rose about 4-5C. Of course, the fresh application of AS5 still needs to do it's 2-3C benefit to the CPU, and also note that these are all Abit-measured, which means that the Intel CPU temp is about 10C high. Anybody know if that is also true of PWM temp?

The Sonata case fans had previously been connected to the TP380S "Fan Only" outputs which ramp fan voltage with PSU load. With the S12-430, I started with them connected to constant 5V. So for the next round, I changed both of them to 7V, and things were much better:

36/49, 29/32, 39/57

Seemed like the Antec exhaust fan was producing more noise then the intake Vantec Stealth (sorry, got it before discovering SPCR), so put that back to 5V and only gained 1C on the CPU.

Latest idea was to attach the intake fan to the motherboard's NB fan header (unused now that I've gone passive) so it can react to load (System temp, which doesn't change much). That put it's low level at 8V, but I still can't hear it over the VGA fan. Maybe I'll add a Fanmate to it later.

Sure wish that Seasonic had added the hinted fan control like Antec, but I'm quite satisfied with temps now:

35/50, 29/31, 39/58

[Spinner]

I just got a S12-380, and I am also a very happy customer.

The Seasonic replaces a 2-year-old 360W High Power PSU (without PFC) which was quite noisy, especially after one of its fans started making some annoying bearing noise.

The noise emitted by the Yate Loon fan in the PSU (at ~35°C intake and ~110W load, while F@H ) is slightly lower than a 120mm sleeve-bearing Globe fan at 5 volts. It is also very smooth and low-frequency noise.

Here's some info from the instructions manual, concerning the operating temperature :

The rated power will reduce from 100% to 80% from 40°C to 50°C

It is consistent with the readings made by MikeC. The efficiency starts to drop from 83% at 40°C.