Fortron Sparkle ZEN

Inside

If you open your PSU, your warranty is gone. We still had to peek inside it.



The two leftmost heatsinks carry current, even when the PSU is just plugged in and the switch on the back is lit. The rightmost heatsink is grounded. This is also the one which gets hottest, in our tests up to 65°C (measured directly at the heatsink).



The inside looks well cleaned up to me. There are no untidy cables or other messy things. The three heatsinks are massive in construction and seem to be able to handle the heat load pretty well.



All capacitors I could spot are high-quality 105°C flavour.

Test Equipment

• The PSU is connected to an APC SmartUPS which supplies clean 220V input.
• AC current is measured using a Peaktech 4010 desktop RS232 multimeter with 0.01A accuracy.
• To measure DC output voltages of the PSU we use a 20-bit data acquisition system calibrated to 10uV accuracy.
• Power Factor is measured using a generic Power Efficiency Meter.
• Heatsink temperature was measured using a HP 2801A thermometer calibrated to 0.01°C.
• Measurements for Ripple Voltage were obtained using a 30 MHz HAMEG Analog/Digital Oscilloscope.