
Aerocool AeroPower II+ 550W PSU Review
Author: Mike Pengelly
Date: May 4th, 2004
Supplied By: Aerocool
Price: $105
Test Setup
Monitor: KDS Xtreme Flat 17”
Case: ThermalTake Xaser V Damier V5000D
Motherboard: MSI K8T Neo FIS2R K8T800
CPU: AMD Athlon64 3200+
Memory: 2 x 512 Geil Value PC3200
Video Card: Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB
Hard Drive: Western Digital 120GB SE 7200 RPM
DVD Drive: NEC 8x DVD+/-RW
CD Drive: LiteON 40x CDRW
NIC: Onboard Realtek Gigabit
Sound Card: M-Audio Revolution 7.1
Speakers: Logitech Z-640 5.1 Speaker Set
OS: Windows XP Pro SP1
A Note on Testing:
For testing we ran 1 DVD burn session, 1 CD burn session, an external hard drive to internal hard drive data transfer and 3dmark03 at the same time in order to put as much load on the power supply as possible for a typical computer system. As we have mentioned before, we don’t feel it is necessary to push a power supply to destruction to prove anything. The test system is about as loaded as you will find for a high end system today and it’s not likely that anyone will do as much as we did to test at the same time. If the power supply performs without any major fluctuations then it is a worthwhile PSU for any application in our opinion.
Idle and Load Results:
As you can see from the results this power supply performed quite well under load. The voltages did fluctuate a little bit more than while the system was running idle but the difference isn’t great enough to cause any concern. Idle results show pretty solid numbers as well with values just about right on what they should be.
And just so that we can verify some numbers we hooked up the multimeter to see just how close the motherboard readings were to actual meter readings. Of course, we must remember that multimeters are calibrated to a given voltage when they are manufactured so the accuracy of the meter really depends on the accuracy of the equipment used to calibrate against. Anyway, here is what we found:
As it turns out, the numbers our meter shows are pretty close to what the motherboard sensors are reporting.
Conclusion:
From the moment I opened the box and saw this power supply I was impressed by it. The supreme paint job, the modded look and the quality of the product overall were shown right away. The unit also performed very well. Often times we find ourselves judging a power supply’s quality on how heavy it is when we lift it out of the box. The AeroPower II+ is not a heavy power supply by any means. You can see right through into the windows that it’s not a beefy supply. The heavier supplies usually tend to have very large heatsinks inside that fill up most of the extra space. If that was done with this power supply then having windows and LED fans would be useless. I can’t say it’s a quiet power supply, at least not as quiet as some of the others that I have reviewed, for example the Enermax Noisetaker which was the quietest. It's tolerable. Having my fans on full blast in the Xaser case will usually drown out the power supply anyways. The only real drawbacks to this power supply that we found were the lack of a 2nd separate 12V rail and the lack of Active PFC. The lack of a separate 12V rail didn’t really seem to make much of a difference to the performance of the unit though. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this power supply as it performs well under load and in a modded case adds great looks.
Pros
Beautiful shiny paint job.
LED Fans.
Solid performance Idle and Load.
Lots of Molex connectors.
UV Active wire sleeving and Molex connectors.
Cons
No 2nd 12V Rail.
No Active PFC.

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