Zalman Quiet Trio

ZM460-APS Power Supply

Finally let's take a look at the Zalman ZM460-APS ATX 460 Watt PSU. Over the last few years the market has been saturated by PSUs so there really has to be a strong selling point for any power supply to stand out from the rest. Zalman are playing the silence card on this product and being Zalman we would expect nothing else.

There are two versions available at 460 Watts, both pretty similar in specification apart from the connectivity. I'll go into a little further detail on the differences shortly, but for now it should suffice for me to say that the ZM460-APS is intended for single graphics card installation and the ZM460B-APS for SLI.


The ZM460-APS is solidly built and has a matte black finish. The large 120mm fan is well protected by a silver finger guard and the grill on the mains input side allows for maximum unrestricted airflow.

Included in the accessory set is a set of Velcro cable management strips, a PCI Express splitter, a 4 pin Molex to two S-ATA splitter, the instruction manual and a ZM-MC1 Molex to two 5V and two 12V splitter. The latter ideal to power more fans from the ZM460-APS if you should so require.



For all you number lovers out there here you can see the power specifications of the ZM460-APS, more importantly though you can see the temperature to noise graph. This shows you that the PSU should stay pretty silent unless under extreme stress, we'll see if the graph rings true when we have had a play with it though.



The connections are not modular, which is a shame, but they are solidly braided and heatshrinked. Unusually though, the braiding doesn’t go all the way into the body of the power supply, I suppose if it bugged you a lot you could braid the last few inches together, but that would involve opening up the PSU, not advisable for the majority of users.

The connection set consists of the following: a 20/24 Motherboard connector; a PCI Express Graphics connector; two 12V motherboard power connectors on one lead; two S-ATA connectors on one lead; two leads with double 4-way Molex and Floppy connector on one lead and a triple 4-way Molex lead.

For the ZM460B-APS the connections are slightly different; a 20/24 Motherboard connector, Two PCI Express Graphics connectors on one lead, two 12V motherboard power connectors on one lead, two leads with double S-ATA connectors, two leads with double 4-way Molex and Floppy connector.

The extra splitters that come with the ZM460-APS actually give it the same connectivity so you wont miss anything.

Conclusions

Testing a PSU has never really been an easy task. However, as an end consumer, all you should really worry about is this: if the unit is pushed to the extreme, will it remain stable and ensure you are not staring at a blank screen. To prove this, we connected it up to quite a powerful system, and stress tested until we were satisfied it was rock solidly stable. The PSU remained well within the required voltages and at no time did we lose any system stability throughout out thorough system workout.

The system we plugged it into was:

• Gigabyte GA 81955 X Royal Motherboard
• Intel Pentium 4 3.4EE LGA775 overclocked to 3.73GHz
• 1GB (2x512MB) Corsair XMS2 5400 RAM
• XFX NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT
• 2 x Samsung Spinpoint SATA 120GB HDD
• 2 x Western Digital WD400JB 40GB HDD
• Sony DVD Drive
• Plextor SATA DVD-RW Drive
• Floppy Drive

More importantly the PSU was quiet throughout. After a few hours of solid testing it's fair to say that it would probably be at it's loudest and the noise levels had increased but never to the point of annoyance. Seems the ZM460-APS has lived up to all the promises it made, but at what price?


Value: At £70 inc vat, which appears to have been recently cut from £80, the ZM460-APS is far from cheap, its silence is in fact golden in more ways than one. The Globalwin Super Silent 450W, Akasa Ultra Quiet 460W and Tagan 420W Whisper Quiet PSU all come in at nearly £20 cheaper than the ZM460-APS and claim to be silent or thereabouts. We are left feeling that if the Zalman was to have that special feature (modularity for example) it would have the edge, even at £20 more expensive, but sadly it doesn't. We are left with a quasi bitter taste in our mouths as we say that at this price you would probably be best investigating similar PSUs for their silent abilities.

To summarise:

Pros:
Quiet
Long, braided leads
Flexible

Cons:
Expensive


What do we think of them? Read on...