| Spire Rocketeer V SP-500W 500W Power Supply
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Performance - Power (continued):
The chart below takes a look at just the Spire Rocketeer unit and how the voltages varied from idle to load conditions...
One thing that did impress me was how stable the voltage rails of the Rocketeer V SP-500W were. I tested each individual rail from boot up through to a fully loaded Windows environment with a 100% CPU load and the multimeter never fluctuated more than 0.05 volts on any of the rails.
I am unable to find any mention of Power Factor Correction (PFC) on the Spire website, or in any of the documentation that came with the Rocketeer V SP-500W, so I can only assume it does not support any form of PFC.
Performance - Cooling:
With the Rocketeer mounted in the Raidmax Ninja case along with the following components it was time to test how well it helped cool the case.
» Asus A7N8X-E motherboard
» Athlon XP2000+ processor
» Radeon 7200
» 512MB RAM (2x256)
» Two 40GB ATA133 7200rpm HDD
» Creative 16X DVD
» Onboard sound and LAN
» Floppy drive (don't ask)
As mentioned earlier in the review, the green button on the back of the Rocketeer controls the 120mm LED fan. With the big fan turned off, the Rocketeer is virtually silent. The 80mm LED fan is automatically temperature controlled. From a cold start up you could hold your hand behind the fan and feel the increased air flow as the case heated up and the fan increased speed, but even on the highest speed this fan is all but silent.
Turning on the 120mm LED fan does increase the noise, but even with the 120mm fan on and the 80mm fan going at full speed the Rocketeer is still what I would call a quiet power supply. With the 120mm fan going, the increased air flow is very noticeable. On a hot day here in Southern California I turned the air conditioning off and let the room temperature get up to 88F. With the 120mm fan turned off and a hardware temperature probe in place, I measured internal case temperature at 34C and the CPU temperature was running at 48C after having been run under 100% CPU load for 4 hours from Folding@Home. I then turned on the 120mm fan and after 30 minutes the internal case temperature had dropped to 32C and the CPU temperature (still under 100% load) was now reading 46.6C. Given more time the 120mm fan may have cooled the case and CPU more, but at this point I caved in and turned on the air conditioning.
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