Date: March 29th, 2010
Article by: Joe Anderson (Hardware Reviewer)
Edited By: Nathan Glentworth (Owner / Head Editor)
Product was submitted by: FSP Group
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PRODUCT PICTORIAL AND WALKTHROUGH
The cables are sleeved all the way into the case and further protected by a plastic grommet to prevent any shorts in this area. As you can see, FSP doesn't include any modular features here, but otherwise this is a very nice, relatively compact package that should also be dead silent during operation. We'll see
PRODUCT INSTALLATION AND TESTING
For this review, Mr. Bones has chosen the following components:
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MSI 945GCM478-L motherboard
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Intel 2.8 GHz Prescott CPU
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Buffalo Firestix DDR2 RAM (2 X 1GB)
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EVGA 8800 GTS 640MB graphics card
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Maxtor 120 GB hard drive
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LG DVD writer
Mr. Bones, while being very vain and shallow, has unimpeachable integrity and will be overseeing testing. Let's proceed.
Testing consisted of monitoring voltages from the +3.3V, +5V, and +12V rails while the system was at idle, and during multiple passes of OCCT while running loops of 3Dmark05. Voltages were monitored with a digital multimeter. Over several days of testing, rails were rock stable and not one power issue reared its ugly head. The results are as follows:
After several days of usage, the Zen 400 displayed excellent results. The measured voltages were very stable and very close to their respective targets and, as expected, the unit was dead silent throughout testing. I was also surprised at how cool the Zen remained during load testing.
While it benefited from a bit of residual breeze from the CPU cooler, no other active cooling was used and while the heatsink got quite warm to the touch, it never got truly hot, even after several hours of load testing.
