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Introduction

FSP are one of the world biggest power supply manufacturers. However, their PSUs have never really stood out when it comes to the enthusiast crowd. Today I have with me the 500w Blue Storm II II that is designed to do just that. It’s bold, its blue and it packs a punch. Lets see how it performs.

Specifications

Bits and Box

The Storm comes in a box with a large swirly thing on the front – some kind of storm I imagine – a picture of the PSU, a few small pictures showing off its ROHS compliancy and some nice media buzz words like “Silent” and “Cool”.

The back of the box has the typical Multi-lingual specifications and feature lists.

Along with the Blue Storm II itself you receive very little in the way of a bundle. Simply a manual and a kettle lead. Oh, and these little tasty sweets in a cotton wrapper.

The Blue Storm II

The FSP Blue Storm II comes in a “mirrored finish” according to their marketing spiel. However on close inspection it is only slightly reflective and is certainly a long shot from the chromed surfaces of some of FSP’s main rivals.

Not to say that the lack of reflection is detrimental to the look of the PSU in any way; in fact it was refreshing not to be looking at my own mug during installation.

Looking a little closer at the Storm we can see that it is fitted with a nicely sized 120mm cooling fan with a gold flecked grill. the grill’s centrepiece is the FSP logo which fits well with the Gold/Blue theme of the rest of the power supply.

The rear of the Blue Storm II is made up of a honey comb grill. This allows for maximum flow of air out through the back giving excellent cooling to the internal components.

The Storm is not modular so does not feature unpluggable cabling. However on the “Front” it has a small grill that allows air to flow directly over a copper coil behind it.

While taking a look at the Storm’s exterior, I noticed that there was a load of extra space inside the casing. After investigating a little further it seems the reason for the wasted space is purely so that the 120mm fan would fit inside. Obviously FSP see cooling as important when it comes to making a power supply.

The cables that come with this unit are all braided and are also colour coded. The PCI-E cables being covered in red braid while the rest are coated in blue. This really makes a difference to their appearance and can also help cable management efforts as it makes it easier to place groups of cables in places instead of struggling with rogue wires.

All of the molex cables feature quick release mechanisms whereby you press down on two protrusions which expels the cable from the socket it is plugged into. This is especially useful in small cases as there is often not enough room to get ample leverage to remove these cables.

Dual Rails

The FSP Blue Storm II features dual 12v rails. To read about what this means, check out our glossary entry here.

Testing

For testing power supplies, we get together the most power hungry of all our hardware, get it all plugged in and then test the rail’s outputs at idle and at load to check their stability. However, since this PSU is rather large in it’s wattage, we decided to use our hillbilly testing setup. This involves placing our AM2 and Conroe systems very near each other and having the Olympia not only powering the entire C2D rig, but also the GPU, hard drives, CD drives and all fans from the AM2 rig.

Testing is performed using Asus Probe. A multimeter is used to check accuracy of readings.

The pieces of hardware that the Blue Storm II 500w powered were:

Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 2.7ghz
Asus P5W DH Deluxe
MSI 8800GTS
x1950 Pro 512mb
2gb OCZ Special Ops. Urban Elite @ 900mhz
1x 36gb WD Raptor
2x 80gb WD Caviar SE
2x LG CD/DVD Writer combo.
3x 120mm Noiseblocker fans
2x 120mm Akasa fans

Results

As you can see from the above results this PSU is pretty darn stable throughout the testing and is a good indication that 500w power supplies are still capable of powering a large amount of high end hardware; counter to what GPU manufacturers would have you believe.

Noise

The Blue Storm II was near silent throughout testing. The only way it is audible is if you are very near to the power supply, or cause extra air turbulence by placing the computer’s rear very close to a wall.

Cost

The FSP Blue Storm II 500w PSU can be found for around £50-£60 which is about on par with other power supplies between 500 and 600 watts.

Conclusion

The Blue Storm II is a well performing, stable power supply. It lacks modular cabling and isn’t particularly flashy, but it comes with cable braiding, quick release molexes, 85% efficiency rating and an effective cooling solution. It is also more than capable of powering high end single GPU systems, though if you are plugging in more than one top of the line graphics card, it would probably be best to pick a PSU with a little more “umph”.

Pros	Cons
Stable	Not particularly powerful
Cable braiding and quick release molex	A bit bland
85% efficient

I’d like to thank our sponsors FSP for providing us with this PSU.

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