Introduction

We would like to thank Spire for supplying the review sample.

Spire is a company known mostly for their cooling solutions and their enclosures. Spire's production facilities are located in Shenzhen, China and they have branches in the USA, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Japan and Brazil. According to them all above locations were strategically selected in order to provide direct communication with their customers. Although their PSU products are not so known (at least to us) they have a pretty rich portfolio meaning that they are pretty active in this area, too and recently they released a new PSU series which they named BlackDragon.

Let's take a better look at the BlackDragon series. For starters it consists of only three units with 600W, 500W and 400W capacities. According to Spire these new PSUs are intended for gamers although their relatively small capacity most likely will not be enough for high-end SLI or Crossfire systems. The test subject of today's review, the 400W model, promises very low noise output (only 10dBA at 45°C operating temperature), 86% efficiency at typical load, utilizes a non-modular design but thankfully its cables are fully sleeved and among others it is equipped with an LED fan. Also it is compatible with the 2.30 ATX spec (most recent is 2.31 with minor changes) and is backed by a two year warranty. Regarding its official efficiency rating Spire does not provide any info on this subject and we couldn't locate this PSU on the 80 Plus site, so most probably it is not yet tested by them.

Specifications

The PSU doesn't carry an 80 Plus certification despite the claims of Spire for up to 86% efficiency, but on their site they state that an 80 Plus certification is pending. They also forgot to inform us with what power input this efficiency can be achieved, since with 230VAC efficiency is usually 1-1.5% higher than 115VAC. Thankfully the maximum operating temperature reaches 50°C and most of the available protections are present in this unit (except the rare OTP and OCP although Spire claims that the latter exists in this PSU). Spire does not mention what kind of bearings the cooling fan is equipped with, but once we dismantled the unit we immediately found out that it has sleeve bearings. The dimensions of the PSU are pretty compact and its weight is small, too. Finally the warranty is short at two years and the MSRP price is quite high for a 400W, non modular, unit.


There are two +12V rails which combined can deliver 360W, so you don't have much headroom here for power hungry components. On the minor rails, 3.3V is weaker than 5V but their combined power is quite high for the mere 400W capacity of the unit. Finally 5VSB has the minimum allowed power for a contemporary PSU, 12.5W.

Cables & Connectors, Power Distribution

The amount of cables/connectors is satisfactory (including two 6+2 pin PCIe connectors), for the capacity of the PSU and this time we are not going to complain about the short cables, since units with such low capacity are usually installed in small cases and not in full tower ones. Also as you can see there are no FDD connector in this PSU. Strangely enough the distance among the SATA connectors is huge, while the 4 pin Molex connectors have the recommended distance among them.
All cables are sleeved but unfortunately not up to the connectors. More specific on the 24 pin ATX, EPS and PCIe cables sleeving ends 5-7 cm before the connectors, something that doesn't look so good at least to our eyes. Finally all connectors use 18AWG, which is of course the recommended size.

Although Spire claims that this unit has two +12V rails, once we opened it we discovered that all +12V rails are connected together and on top of that the supervisor IC does not support OCP, so in fact this is a single rail PSU. This isn't a problem of course, since the unit's capacity is low but we would prefer to be informed about the single +12V rail from the beginning rather than having to discover it by ourselves.

Packaging

The unit comes in a small packaging of course, since it has an equally small footprint. On the top side there is a carrying handle to make the transportation of the package easier while on the face of the box we find an image of the unit along with a dragon's illustration and a brief features description. On the rear side you can read a quite long text which describes the benefits of the BlackDragon units and on the left there is a table showing the available connectors of each BlackDragon unit. In this table a 300W unit is mentioned but on Spire's site we didn't find any reference to it.