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Unsurprisingly, given we ran the tests at its facilities, FSP provided us with a couple of PSUs to test. The first of these is the Blue Storm II 500W. It's a non-modular unit and comes with just a small bag of five case screws for fitting the power supply (one spare), an FSP sticker, a mains power cable, and three wide hook-and-loop cable ties.

The unit itself is finished in an interesting shade of blue, a colour that's continued by the braiding round the cabling, and complemented by a shiny gold fan grill. Aside from being a slightly odd colour scheme in the first instance, the look is really spoiled by the two PCI-Express power cables being braided in red. Certainly this wouldn't be my first choice on looks but, ultimately, the colour of a PSU is not something that's going to bother most people once it's inside a case so we can forgive it.

As well as the two 45cm PCI-Express cables (one six-pin and one eight-pin), there are two 85cm cables each with three Molex and a single floppy drive connector, one 45cm cable with a four-pin auxiliary CPU power connector, two 58cm cables each with two SATA connectors, and the obligatory main motherboard connector that sits at the end of a 45cm cable. Rarely, for a modern PSU, there is no eight-pin auxiliary CPU power cable so be sure to check which type of connector your motherboard requires before opting for this unit. Also, all the cables are a little on the short side and four SATA connectors is probably a little low in this day and age.


During our testing the unit performed perfectly well at 50 percent load. It also coped with 100 per cent load on its 3.3V and 5V rails. However, when we tried to load it to 100 per cent on the 12V rails it refused to turn on. This forced us to instead try a 400W load (80 per cent) during which it performed perfectly well and delivered a healthy 84.3 per cent efficiency. Still, this failure at 100 per cent may be enough to put some people off.


Moving onto sound level testing and this unit was pretty much in the middle of the group with a perfectly acceptable level of 37dB when idling. Under load, however, this increased significantly to be our joint-second noisiest PSU at 45dB. As with all but one of the PSUs on test, though, the fan on the HD 4870X2 was much louder during these load periods, so this shouldn't concern you overly.

Verdict

In essence this is a modest power supply for a modest system. The relatively short cables means this is probably not one to use in an oversized case and the colour scheme isn't really one to show off. The failure to start at 100 per cent load may be of concern to some, but it's worth remembering that even a fairly high-end gaming rig is unlikely to push above 400W so you should still be safe. Still, there are better alternatives on the market.

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