In this review I had the chance to test a PSU from Spire for the first time. The BlackDragon series mainly targets the budged oriented users who seek for a decent performing PSU that carries some bells and whistles (e.g. the LED fan). The 400W member of this series offers decent efficiency, good voltage regulation overall (for its category), tolerance to high operating temperatures and quiet operation. All above are housed in a compact size enclosure which will fit even in a very small case, making this PSU ideal for an HTPC.
The setbacks of the BlackDragon 400W are the lousy performance at the cross load tests, due to its group regulated design, the low efficiency at 5VSB (at least with small loads) and I also didn't like the fact that the PSU kept shutting down during the Advanced Transient Response tests. I have tested numerous units with equally small capacity in the past and this is the first time that I encounter this problem. Thankfully during all other tests I didn't notice similar behavior although I applied almost all loads dynamically. Finally the most significant drawback of this unit is its high MSRP price. If Spire doesn't revise pricing then the small BlackDragon will have a really hard time competing with similar capacity PSUs.

To sum up, I think that the small Spire unit performed well in most of the tests I conducted but with such a high MSRP things will be very difficult against the tough (and more affordable) competition. In my humble opinion an ideal retail price for this unit would be around $50.