Spire BlackDragon 400 W Review

Name: Spire BlackDragon 400 W
Brand: Spire

crmaris

on Feb 8th, 2012,

in Power Supplies.

Manufacturer: Spire

Performance Rating & Performance per Dollar »

Ripple Measurements

In the following table you will find the ripple levels that we measured on the main rails of the BlackDragon 400W. According to ATX specification the limits are 120 mV (+12V) and 50 mV (5V, 3.3V and 5VSB).

Ripple Measurements Spire SP-R-400WTB-PFC
Test	12 V	5 V	3.3 V	5VSB	Pass/Fail
20% Load	10.5 mV	26.4 mV	15.3 mV	7.9 mV	Pass
40% Load	11.5 mV	27.1 mV	20.0 mV	10.5 mV	Pass
50% Load	15.9 mV	27.1 mV	22.6 mV	10.4 mV	Pass
60% Load	19.8 mV	29.6 mV	25.3 mV	11.1 mV	Pass
80% Load	22.2 mV	30.4 mV	26.5 mV	17.1 mV	Pass
100% Load	24.5 mV	32.8 mV	30.6 mV	18.9 mV	Pass
Crossload 1	19.8 mV	31.6 mV	30.0 mV	11.3 mV	Pass
Crossload 2	28.9 mV	22.8 mV	27.3 mV	15.7 mV	Pass

Ripple suppression on the +12V rail is excellent, although a big part on this surely is because of the limited capacity of the unit. The minor rails are more noisy, but definitely won't cause any trouble since even at worst case they register 17-21mV lower ripple than the limit. Finally, 5VSB also enjoy quite good ripple suppression.

Ripple at Full Load

In the following oscilloscope screenshots you can see the AC ripple and noise that the main rails registered (+12V, 5V, 3.3V and 5VSB). The bigger the fluctuations on the oscilloscope's screen the bigger the ripple/noise. For all measurements we set 0.01 V/Div (each vertical division/box equals to 0.01V) as standard.