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Codegen 400W power supply unit and AcoustiFan 80mm case fan

Technical.

The last power supply unit that I bought did wonders for the stability of my machine. Before I installed it I was plagued with lockups during games and random crashes occurred all over the place. Replacing the cheapo PSU with an expensive model cured all these ills in one fell swoop. Unfortunately the Thermaltake PSU left me with a new problem as it sounded as if a fleet of miniature helicopters had somehow got themselves trapped inside. Not as severe as what had been solved, it was still an annoyance that built up over time until I had to do something about it. Fortunately I got an email from Graeme at Kustom PCs which was to prove my salvation.

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The Codegen is a 400w power supply which has the most oversized bloody fan I have ever seen outside of a Star Trek convention. Overall the design is unusual without making you want to run to the hills screaming in shock. Usually PSUs have a fan or two at their rear which suck hot air off of the components and blow it out the back of the PC. The Codegen has this giant fan which sits inside the PSU enclosure sucking in air straight from the case. As the fan is on the roof rather than a wall of the enclosure it blows the air over the components and out the back of the PSU. The rear of this PSU is all grill, a mass of square holes about the width of your average roll-up. What this all means is the Codegen has a wanging great big fan turning at a near inaudibly low number of RPMs blowing a bunch of air over the hot parts and then out of the case completely. The temperature in my case remained the same as it was when I had the turbine-sounding Thermaltake running in it without sacrificing any power levels or reliability. Throughout the testing period the voltages of each rail remained rock solid, except for infrequent variations of the Vcore. This caused no problems for my 2800XP which is overclocked to 3200 speeds. This is better than the Thermaltake where all the voltages were susceptible to the occasional small rise and dip. The Codegen also comes with a 12V output next to the kettle-plug socket which gives you the option of plugging peripherals such as USB hubs straight into the PSU, saving one socket space. It even comes with a cable just for this. Taking this added bonus along with the performance and silent running the Codegen 400W PSU is a fantastically priced bit of kit coming in at £25. The quietness of this PSU has stress reducing qualities which are worth more than twice the amount that is asked for.

Along with the super-quiet PSU, I was sent an 80mm AcoustiFan. It is expensive of that there is no doubt - for the cost of three of them you could buy a brand new game - but your money buys you a lot of stuff. If you are looking for a case fan and you are looking for one that will not keep the termites in your house alive at night then it really is a beaut. Using a sleeveless design rather then ball-bearings it is almost completely silent, and once the case was sealed again it may as well not have been there. There's enough airflow going on to keep things good and cool, but if things were to get too hot the little rheostat would up the RPMs to ensure cool runnings. For your money you also get four rubber grommets which can be inserted, with some difficulty, into the case. These help to prevent vibration, and hence noise. It also comes with a resistor which steps the voltage down a bit, from 12 to around 7 volts, which causes the fan to run even slower and quieter. I decided to take this small piece of cabling and fit it onto one of my normal case fans and it helped bring the overall noise down that little bit farther. AcoustiFan have made a quality product which I cannot recommend highly enough. You really get what you pay for.

Both of these products do a great job in helping to make your PC less of an anti-social noise demon. The PSU has the best price over performance ratio and really should not be ignored. While the fan is more of an optional addition once it had a chance to prove its worth I was most taken with the difference it made. It may only be an incremental change but it is well within the realms of my sense of hearing. As the noisiest thing in my machine is the fan on my graphics card you can probably appreciate how nice and quiet things are now in my living room. A few more additions and things should be quieter than a Clarissa Dickson Wright phone-sex line.

Codegen - 94%
AcoustiFan - 88%

Both of these products can be had from Kustom PCs.

1. That review is largely invalid because no voltage-amperage information was provided to show that the power supply was capable of meeting its power and current ratings. For all we know, this PS can't put out more than 200W, what a fairly heavily loaded computer draws.

   Tim B. Friday, 13 February 2004, 01:26:26

2. 2 Optical drives, 3 hard drives, 3 case fans, 1 cpu fan, 1 overclocked amd cpu, 1 soundcard, 5 usb devices and a radeon 9600 pro tell me that this PSU can handle anything you would expect a 400W PSU to handle.

   Sam Friday, 13 February 2004, 03:52:33

3. This PSU came with my briza case also by codegen. It seems to run ok. I have it connected to an MSI PM8M3-V or something mobo and i have occasional random shutdowns. It would occur anywhere from an hour to 12hrs of operation so im not sure what it could be.

   Sam: what kind of uptimes are you getting with this PSU? Cheers,

   Uzhiel

   uzhiel b Friday, 12 May 2006, 13:04:5

4. This is not a very good review...

   There's no date, and as Tim B said, it doesn't really give the technical data of the PSU, so how should this be useful to a person looking to upgrade a PSU? And no photos...

   J Thursday, 1 June 2006, 17:58:18