Xilence Performance A Series 730W Power Supply Review

Introduction & Packaging During August 2013 the parent company of well-known German brand Be Quiet, Listan GmbH & Co. KG (Listan for short), announced their takeover of the German-Taiwanese brand "Xilence". As part of the deal Listan took complete ownership of the entire Xilence portfolio and all of its trademarks. The Xilence brand now operates as a separate subsidiary company and brand under the Listan parent company. With the Xilence brand, Listan are hoping to address the mainstream and volume market segments of power supplies and cooling fans while reserving Be Quiet for more expensive and premium product offerings. The transition from its previous ownership to its new guidance and direction under Listan has now started to take effect. In mid-July Xilence presented their newest product range: the Performance A power supply Series. The main target of the Performance A Series is good quality power with competitive pricing. The Performance A series offers 430, 530, 630 and 730 watt variants with retail prices of €33.90, €37.90, €45.90 and €52.90 respectively. Today we are able to take a look at the Performance A Series 730W model and see exactly what it has to offer. Packaging and Contents The packaging of the Xilence brand is fairly basic reflecting the budget orientation of the product. The box points out the 80 Plus and ErP 2014 certifications. It also quite amusingly has a box stating that it is "ready for graphics cards" - well with 730W on offer I'd certainly hope so! Around the back of the box we see the influence the new leadership has had. Just like Be Quiet, Xilence now list all the different connectors out and the lengths of each cable, good information to have especially for such a budget unit. The included accessories are fairly basic, we find a power cable, four black screws and a brief user manual. A Closer Look - Exterior Power Supply Unit The Xilence 730W PSU has a striking aesthetic mainly due to the bold red fan. To be honest if those cables were sleeved up nicely this would be one of the better looking red power supplies on the market! On the side we find the usual sticker that details rails, watts and various certifications. We find the other side has the information flipped to allow it to be the "correct" way up when you mount the unit with the fan facing down. At the back there is some simple hexagonal mesh, a kettle lead input and power switch. The base is as plain as you'll get, or the top depending on how you mount it inside your case. At the cable end we find a little ventilation and then all the cables grouped together and held in place with a cable tie. Cabling The cabling is as basic as you'll see. There are no frills attached here: it is all about getting the lowest priced unit possible so dressing up the cables is a non-necessary luxury. For delivering that 730W of power we find four 6+2 pins, a 24 pin motherboard connector and a CPU 4+4 pin. The different coloured yellow cables reflect the multiple 12 volt rails this unit has. The other cables provide six SATA, three molex and one FDD. A Closer Look - Interior From my best knowledge I believe the internals of the Xilence Performance A series are based on an OEM design by HEC/Compucase. I believe it uses a slightly modified version of the same platform used by Thermaltake's Smart 730W, which is a more expensive power supply. The modifications to the platform allow it to be cheaper and these include a few less filtering capacitors and slightly lower quality ones: for example they are rated for 85 degree operation rather than 105 degree operation. The provided fan is the "DFS122512H" and is branded as HEC made (hence my inclination towards HEC/Compucase as the OEM). I could not find specifications of the fan but given its amp rating (and the results of our testing) I believe it operates up to a maximum RPM of 1700. It also supports temperature controlled RPM so it should stay fairly quiet when the PSU isn't being stressed. As mentioned, the unit is dominated by 85 degrees rated filtering and electrolytic capacitors. These are all made by Teapo as far as I can see and the primary hold-up capacitor is rated for 470uF at 450V. The overall compactness of the design is impressive so it will be interesting to see how well it performs. Test Procedure At eTeknix we take the power supply testing procedure very seriously and have invested a lot of resources into acquiring the appropriate testing equipment. For all power supply reviews we test the power supplies with dedicated power supply testing equipment. This means we are able to get the most accurate results from our testing as opposed to using software benchmarks (such as OCCT) or multi-meter readouts which are broadly inaccurate. Our test machinery is as follows: Sunmoon SM-5500ATE Active Load Tester (1200W rated) Sunmoon SM-268 Active Load Tester (450W rated) GW Instek GPM-8212 Digital Power Meter Stingray DS1M12 USB Oscilloscope Voltcraft DT-10L laser tachometer The eTeknix test procedure involves: Testing each power supply at 20/40/60/80/100% load (with balanced load across all rails) and measuring PFC (power factor correction), efficiency (actual power divided by power "pulled at the wall") and voltage regulation (deviance from expected voltages of 3.3/5/12 on the main rails). Measuring ripple with an oscilloscope at 20/40/60/80/100% load. Measuring fan speed after a stabilisation period of five minutes at each load scenario using the Voltcraft DT-10L laser tachometer and a reflective strip on the fan. Testing each power supply's OPP (Over Power Protection) mechanism and seeing how many watts each power supply can deliver before shutting down Other things to consider are that We recognise that a single yellow 12 volt cable can provide only 6 Amps before overheating (which corrupts voltage regulation and efficiency) and so we used an adequate number of cables for each power supply to ensure there is not efficiency loss from poor cables selection Our Sunmoon SM-5500ATE power supply tester is not capable of testing more than 300W on each of the 12 volt rails so where a power supply provides more than 300W on a 12 volt rail that power is distributed over multiple 12 volt rails on the load tester. For example a power supply with one 12 volt rail supplying 750 watts would be spread equally over three 12 volt rails on the load tester, a power supply with two 450W 12v rails would be spread over four 12v rails on the load tester, two 225W 12v rails for each of the 12v rails on the unit. We use the same time scale and horizontal millivolt scale on our oscilloscope for all ripple tests, that is a 20ms T/DIV (horizontal) and a 0.02 V/DIV (vertical) meaning the scale is from -80mV to +80mV, ATX spec dictates that the 12v rail must fall within 150mv of ripple and the 3.3/5 within 50mv so that scale allows us to include both 150 and 50mV peaks. (Some older PSU reviews use different scales which were later ditched as the visual representation they give is inadequate, in these reviews written measurements are provided only). Deviance is the terminology used to represent the way voltages diverge from the expected values Efficiency, PFC and Voltage Regulation Voltage Regulation To test voltage regulation we load the power supply to five different load scenarios that give an equal spread of load across every single rail. So that means 20% on all rails, 40% on all rails and so on. We then calculate the average deviance of each rail from its expected voltage. Power Efficiency Power efficiency is measured by calculating actual supplied wattage divided by the wattage drawn at the wall/plug, multiplied by 100 to give a percentage. We then compare that to the particular 80 Plus certification the company claims to see if it meets that. You can see the 80 Plus certifications below, we always test 230v power supplies. Power Factor Correction Power Factor Correction is the ratio of the real power flowing to the load, to the apparent power in the circuit. The aim of PFC is to make the load circuitry that is power factor corrected appear purely resistive (apparent power equal to real power). In this case, the voltage and current are in phase and the reactive power consumption is zero. The closer the number to one the better as this allows the most efficient delivery of electrical power (Source - Wikipedia). Ripple Noise and Ripple can easily be measured by an oscilloscope. These show how much voltage fluctuation there is on a particular rail. We tested the rail stability of the 3.3 volt, 5 volt and 12 volt rails using an identical time and millivolt scale for all graphs. millivolt ripple is measured by the peak to peak size of the voltage curve. The latest ATX 12 volt version 2.3 specifications state that ripple from peak to peak must be no higher than 50 millivolts for the 3.3 volt and 5 volt rails, while the 12 volt rail is allowed up to 120 millivolts peak to peak to stay within specifications. Millivolt figures are stated to the closest increment of 5 given their variability. Load (%) 3.3V Ripple 5V Ripple 12V Ripple 20 10mV 10mV 25mV 40 10mV 10mV 35mV 60 15mV 10mV 50mV 80 15mV 20mV 70mV 100 20mV 20mV 75mV Over Power Protection and Max Wattage Power supplies often quote as having various protection mechanisms such and the most important of these is Over Power Protection. In our testing we crank up the power draw until the power supply either shuts down (meaning the OPP mechanism is present and working) or blows up (meaning it is either not present or not working). We then note the maximum power consumption before the power supply shut down (or blew up). Fan Speed When testing in a power supply laboratory it is difficult to take fan noise readings as the noise from the Sunmoon test equipment and air conditioning corrupts everything. The next best thing in our circumstances was reading off the fan speed with a tachometer to get an idea for the noise. The ambient temperature during testing held constant at 22 degrees, with 1 degree of variation. Each power supply had a consistent time period of 5 minutes to stabilise between each load scenario. In my experience the following general relationships apply between noise levels and fan speeds, though it can vary greatly between the type of fan used. Below 800 RPM - Inaudible/Silent 800 to 1000 RPM - Barely audible 1000 - 1200 RPM - Audible but still quiet 1200 - 1400 RPM - Moderately noisy 1400 - 1800 RPM - Noisy 1800 RPM or higher - Intolerable Final Thoughts Pricing The Xilence Performance A Series 730W power supply has an MSRP of €52.90. In the UK it retails for £56.99 at eBuyer and £51.95 at Stuff UK. The Xilence Performance A Series 730W PSU comes with a 2 year warranty. This product is not currently sold in North America. Conclusion Before we dive into this conclusion it is worth just reiterating the price of this unit, €53 MSRP. In the UK we're seeing elevated pricing due to imported stock from the continent but in mainland Europe this power supply is selling for around €50 at quite a few retailers: which is good value for money. I'm not sure how €50 translates into £55, but at that price its competitive edge is lost in the UK as SilverStone and Cooler Master both offer better all round power supplies for a similar price. On the continent it retains the competitive edge as something like Corsair's CX750 fetches €80. Overall we can see that some compromises have been made to keep the cost down, but let's start with the positives. In terms of voltage regulation we saw very strong performance - especially on the 12v rail - although the 5 volt and 5 volt standby rails did droop a litte. The PFC performed well for such a budget unit so we can tell the active PFC implementation works a treat. The power supply was mainly quiet, which was assisted by the fact the fan's maximum RPM is 1700. This unit finds itself rated for 80 Plus (White) but it was actually capable of slightly better than 80 Plus Bronze meaning Xilence are under-rating it. Finally, the ripple suppression on the 3.3 and 5 volt rails was solid: I've seen similar performance on 80 Plus Platinum rated units in the past and that says a lot. There are a few things we didn't like though. Firstly, the cabling is not great. Obviously this is how costs are saved so it is to be expected, but the non-modular design with no sleeving except on the 24 pin is still basic. The cables are also a little on the short side but Xilence clearly indicate cable lengths so it would be easy to check if the cables are long enough for your particular system. Secondly, the 12 volt ripple suppression is nothing special. The ATX specification allows for up to 150 mV, and we saw around 75mV which is high but still well within ATX spec. There's no question you could probably halve that ripple by spending a bit more on a better quality power supply...but of course that means spending more and this power supply is all about cost. The main advantage of this unit is that you can get 730W of stable and reliable power for just €50. Okay the 12 volt ripple is on the high side but it isn't anything catastrophic, especially as most people will probably only use this PSU with a system that pulls less than 500W and at those kind of wattages it does around 50-60mV which is a lot more acceptable. The way I see it; the Xilence Performance A Series 730W PSU offers a nice bridge between the cheap and nasty unbranded power supplies and the higher end power supplies from reputable brands. It is a bridge because it sits somewhere in the middle on pricing but makes bigger strides towards higher end power supplies in performance. While you won't be getting the best quality power supply in the world, for the money you still get something that is solid and will actually deliver its rated wattage without blowing up, over-heating or damaging your components. Pros Quiet operation Higher than rated efficiency Good PFC Strong voltage regulation Competitive EU pricing Cons Mediocre 12v ripple suppression Poor UK pricing No cable sleeving "The Performance A Series 730W is a strong offering from Xilence in the cheap power supply space: despite its low pricing the unit still offers strong and reliable power. If you're in the market for a "no-frills attached" kind of PSU then this could be for you, providing you can get it at the right price." Thank you to Xilence for providing this review sample.

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