Seasonic Fanless X-520FLII 520W Passive Power Supply Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
1,355 words · ~6 min read
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Silence junkies rejoice. This is the C
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Sonic 80 Plus platinum fanless,
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guys. Fanless 520 W power supply. Very, very cool
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stuff. So, we're going to go ahead and get this pretty much sort of opened up
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quick fast here with all the accessories and cool stuff while I explain how the
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heck CIC managed to produce a power
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supply that even four or 5 years ago
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would have been as high-end as it gets in terms of the wattage that it outputs.
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Not only that, but oh, actually, I need this for a little bit longer. but crank
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up the efficiency to the point where the thing doesn't even need a fan. And they
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are confident providing a 7-year warranty to people to use this thing
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with no freaking fan for 7 years and
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actually have a chance of that happening. Well, not just chance. I'm
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sure if they're putting a 7-year warranty on it, their actual meantime
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between failure is going to be significantly longer than that cuz that's generally how that works. All
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right. So, accessory-wise, we've got some screws for mounting. We've got some
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zip ties for cable management. We've got some Velcro ties for cable management. A
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powered by CIC sticker. Look at that. It's fully modular, too. Owner's manual.
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This power supply is designed for to be responsible for its own cooling and
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functionality only. So, guys, think about it this way. So, sometimes when
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you have a power supply and it's got a fan on the top of it and you have like a
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passive graphics card near it, you can rely on some of that incidental air flow
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to cool your graphics card. This power supply doesn't contribute to the rest of
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your systems cooling in any way. So, you got to make sure that if you're building
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a silent system, you're doing it responsibly and there's enough overall
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system air flow that none of the components are just going to burn out.
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That's basically what they're trying to say here. Next, we've got our commitment
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to superior quality with their 24-hour service and their call out for the
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7-year warranty as well as sort of where to find your serial number and all that good stuff. So, the PSU itself install
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with the ventilation top cover facing up. This is common sense, but it's a
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good thing they say so because someone was going to install it like this and
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they were going to have the heat not actually be able to rise anywhere. So,
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the way this is designed is for natural convection to take place. So, a little
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bit of air will come in here and will waft out the top of the power supply and
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that is how it is intended to be cooled. So, we're actually going to take this
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off so you can actually see there's nice tall heat sinks in there. See those ones
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right by the side that are near that intake that I showed you on the side?
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That's how it's supposed to work. It is designed for that. If you run this in a
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configuration other than what they're recommending, like if you were to run it
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on its side, I'm sure CIC would kind of give you the please don't do that. Uh
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because that might explode things sort of speech. So, make sure you run it this
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way. On the back, you find your standard honeycomb ventilation. In fact, this
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whole power supply is basically honeycomb ventilation. See that? More
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there, more there. There's the fully modular power supply. So, let's go
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ahead. All right, power supply the fully modular interface. So, let's go ahead
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and have a look at what we've got included in terms of cables. It looks like they give you a lot of options
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because we have a big cable pack considering that this is a 520 W power
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supply. Here we go. So, we've got this
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is a dual Molex here. I'm going to put them over there. Here's a Molex to
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floppy adapter just in case you need one of those. There's a triple Molex
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harness. There's a quad SATA harness and a dual SATA harness. That's actually a
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pretty good mix. And then I suspect in the other one we're going to find things
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like 24 pin PCIe and 8 pin which happens
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to be exactly what we're going to find
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there. So there you go. There's your 24 pin. Beautifully sleeved all black
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cables. Love to see that. Uh and then there is an 8 pin. That's a breakaway 4
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plus4. Look at that. A ribbon cable 8 pin. Gorgeous. I don't know if I've seen
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that before. Uh and then finally two ribbon cable power supply uh 6 plus2s.
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So the only one that's actually sleeved here is the 24 pin. And even that one
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uses gorgeous sle and uh all black
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cables. So this will look extremely clean in your case no matter what you
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install. Now they actually include more options here than you actually can can
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fully utilize, I think. Oh, wait. No, no, they don't. You can plug in all of the modular cables. Hold on. two SATA,
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three Molex, two Molex. Yeah. Yeah. They all go in. But they've got an extra one
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for CPU PCIe. So, it's possible if you contacted CSIC and asked them for, you
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know, you had a board that has two eight pins or something like that or you had a
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single video card that has three six or three eight pins, they might be able to
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send you another one. So, this is for your 24, there's your 8, there's your
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auxiliary, and there's your PCI Express.
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Uh, let's see if we missed anything. So, oh, right. My suspicion for how they did
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this, right? Because I don't know if you guys know this, but CIC has a 1000 watt
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unit that doesn't even turn on the fan until 50%. So, if you do sort of the
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rough mental math, that's about 500
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watts. So, I suspect when you buy this, the price is going to be pretty high.
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And what you're actually getting is probably a much much beefier power
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supply that is just sort of scaled down so that they can run it without a fan.
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However, the advantage of buying this versus just buying the thousand watt is
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that this one is going to get the proper efficiency at the kind of system loads
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that you're going to be using it with. So, when you run a 1000 watt power supply at, you know, 200 watts under
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load with your system because you have a power silence optimized system, you're
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actually getting like the worst possible efficiency on that curve, which they
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conveniently do not have on this box. but on the efficiency curve which
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basically goes not very efficient very very very efficient and then kind of tails down like that. Um so you're
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better off to run a lower wattage power supply if you're not going to use the full capacity of it. Patented DC
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connector panel with integrated voltage regulation. So basically what they're trying to say here it was 105° Celsius
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Japanese cap solid cap 7 your everything is just sort of the bomb. I love CIC
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power supplies. Uh if people ask me sort of what's a good power supply to buy a
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very safe answer is CIC. Good stuff. Don't forget to subscribe to Lis Tech
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Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos. And thank you so much for watching. And we missed
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something. There's a little treat inside here. See, there's your power cable.