Seasonic M12D 850W: DC-to-DC Perfection?
by Christoph Katzer on November 26, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
Packaging and Appearance
The power supply comes in a nice package, enclosed by a bubble wrap bag. This is a modular power supply, so the extra cables come with a small bag that you can use to store the extras. You also get a manual and warranty card, which you will want to hang onto since this power supply comes with a five-year warranty.
This is another black power supply, which probably doesn't matter to most users. The power supply doesn't need to be painted at all, but somehow gray power supplies are no longer as desirable, so PSU companies have settled on black as the new standard. As always, the back is perforated to allow air to exhaust from the PSU, but there's a large Seasonic logo next to the AC jack that blocks some of the ventilation. This is nothing to worry about, however, as Seasonic placed the filtering stage right behind this area, shielded by copper plate that would have blocked airflow regardless.
Compared to some competing power supplies, the 120mm fan looks a little small -- lately we've seen 130 and 140mm fans that take up the entire bottom of the PSU. We will look at cooling and noise performance later to see if that makes a difference. The front of the PSU has six sockets for peripheral cable harnesses and two PEG harnesses. As a whole, the PSUs looks very sleek and displays great craftsmanship, which is nothing less than we would expect from Seasonic.
We took the fan grille off and power up the PSU so that you could see what's directly below the fan. We felt the fins on the heatsinks were a little too big, but Seasonic assures us the size was calculated for optimal performance. It's still better than what we've seen with CWT built models, where the fins block most of the airflow resulting in components that often get hotter than necessary. Seasonic leaves plenty of space between the wide fins, so airflow to the components below will not be a problem. Looking at the above image, you can also see that both the primary and secondary heatsinks will get plenty of airflow, so cooling should be very good.
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sprockkets - Wednesday, November 26, 2008 - link
Very bad waveform with very high frequency components? The "waveform" exists since it cannot perfectly make a flat line voltage.Besides, the ATX12V 2.3 spec allows 120 mV ripple for all 12V lines and 50 mV ripple for the 3.3 and 5V lines. It is very well within spec, and consider that these ripple specs are stricter than previous versions of the ATX12V spec, you are going to be fine.
valdir - Wednesday, November 26, 2008 - link
Waveform exists since we are looking and measuring it... and there are good and bad ripple and noise waveforms on the DC rails, just compare with Antec Signature or Corsair 750W or Enermax Revolution or... definitively a very bad waveform.These waveforms are more like very high frequency noise covering ripple and this is not good, since on the PSU's DC rails we should see ripple and not the same noise level.
mindless1 - Saturday, November 29, 2008 - link
Actually it won't make a bit of difference in use. The day a little bit of ripple or it's frequency matters, will be the day we all start using linear PSU again.fri2219 - Wednesday, November 26, 2008 - link
Why does Seasonic insist on putting crappy ADDA fans in 150.00+ units? For the same price, they could at least source from Panasonic or Yate Loon.That ticking sound in the "heavily undervoltaged fan" (nice heavily murderaged of the englished language, there) is incredibly annoying for those of us who haven't destroyed our hearing by playing our iPods at 90db every day for the last 5 years.
mindless1 - Saturday, November 29, 2008 - link
WTF? Yate Loon is the bottom of the barrel, ADDA is mid quality. If you want a yate loon on your case wall it's not so bad but those fail pretty frequently when placed horizontally in a PSU.sprockkets - Wednesday, November 26, 2008 - link
Perhaps you can re-read page 1 where it says it uses a Sanyo Denki fan.And, what is "murderaged" spelling hypocrite?
Slash3 - Wednesday, November 26, 2008 - link
Wooshed.JarredWalton - Wednesday, November 26, 2008 - link
FWIW, that was another error with the speech-recognition. Dragon NaturallySpeaking does so well that sometimes I miss errors in dictation. Apparently, it thinks "undervoltage" is an allowable word, but I know I said "undervolted". Whatever.In case you're wondering, Christoph is not a native English speaker, but he is fluent in at least English, French, and Chinese -- besides his native tongue of German. Feel free to critique his use of a second tongue; me, I'm happy to speak English, Danish, and some German. Anyway, I do pretty heavy editing of his text to clean up the English, but errors slip through on occasion. I was pressed for time on this one (had to run off to the airport) so I didn't give the final text a second proofread.
RallyMaster - Wednesday, November 26, 2008 - link
"That's not entirely wrong, as PSUs are one of the components most people only think about when their old unit sales, or when building a new system."What does "old unit sales" even mean? Are you sure you're not saying "old unit fails?"
Spoelie - Wednesday, November 26, 2008 - link
Page 1"The PSUs are also supposed to have very tight voltage regulation in the future only Japanese manufactured capacitors."
I'm not quite sure what to make of that sentence.