New Zalman Power Supplies

There have been some significant improvements made to the computer power supply. The cheapest models are still very inefficient (somewhere around 50%) and break down quickly (only after 1-2 years of use), but all professional power supplies exceeded the 80% efficiency mark and most of them live to become 5-7 years old. This means that the amount of wasted energy is finally reduced to a reasonable level.

A 1000Watt power supply with 80% efficiency looses only 200Watts at full load of power in the form of heat, while the same amount of energy is wasted by a cheap 450Watt power supply at a 200Watt load. These specs alone should make you think twice before buying a cheap power supply for a computer that will run all the time.

Zalman started out as a cooler manufacturer for desktop computers, but it has recently entered other fields such as the ones including power supplies, SDDs, 3D monitors and other minor computer accessories.

Two new Zalman power supplies will hit the shelves soon. One is the ZM850-HP Plus and the other one ZM1000-HP Plus. Both are rated at 87% efficiency, a percentage which qualifies them for the Silver 80Plus sticker. The most interesting park of these power supplies is the heatpipe cooling solution used inside. At such an efficiency level heatpipe cooling may seem as overkill, but Zalman really wanted to make a highly efficient and silent power supply. Traditional fan cooling results only in high RPM and also in additional noise.

As you can see in this picture, there’s still room for a bigger heatpipe cooler, only about half of the full width of the power supply enclosure is occupied by the aluminum heat sinks. Even on the circuit board there is some free space, so we can expect even more powerful power supplies in the future based on the same technology, but with a bigger heatpipe cooler.

By default there are only few cables coming out of the power supply, with the following connectors: the 24-pin ATX power connector, two 4-pin CPU power connectors and two 6-pin connectors for the first graphics card.

Optionally, other five cables can be connected with a total of 22 additional power connectors: 9 for SATA drives, 8 for legacy IDE devices, one for the floppy disk drive and 4 (6-pin) for two additional high-end graphics cards.

They both have a 10,000hour MTBF (meantime between failures) rating, which means 416 days of continuous use at full load, and significantly more if it’s turned off everyday while the user is asleep or otherwise unable to use it.

A lot of safety features have also been implemented in order to save the user’s investment is such a professional power supply.

Over-temperature, under-voltage, over-voltage, short-circuit and over-current protections are all present, thanks to this small vertical circuit board containing the monitoring chip.

Another important feature is that both Zalman power supplies consume less than 1Watt of power when being kept in standby mode, but this is of course a half-truth, because you may have USB accessories connected to active USB ports which can drain a total of 10Watts of additional power, also in standby mode, so the 1Watt power consumption refers only to the power supply.

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