HEC 585W - Good Bad & Ugly

C

Caffeinated

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Oct 16, 2002
Messages
1,451
The good: I got one of these to put in a relatively junkie, but on the higher end of power hungry box I needed. I paired it with a Prescott 3.0Ghz, a Geforce 6800 GT, 2GB of RAM and a cheapo PATA 250 GB hard drive. I needed a decent VMWare capable XP/Debian box.

I've overclocked the processor a little bit, and the video card a good bit (375/2080).

It's damned good for a PSU I picked up off of Directron for $24. The amperage rating is 19A 12V 1/20A 12V 2, rest fpr 3.3V and 5V, and honestly it doesn't seem to be a gimmick rating because my system is running well.

The bad: It's a bit loud. Not as loud as say, a Vantec Tornado, but it's not quiet.

The ugly: It's ugly. No chrome or black finish here. No lights. It's gray metal ugly.

Verdict: It gets the job done if you aren't upset about loud or lacking bling.

EDIT: I wanted to add that it isn't light like most of the crap ones. It's fairly heavy, surprisingly enough. Only comes with one SATA connector and one 6-pin PCI-e, and that is from the splitter that came attached to the unit.

Anyone else try one of these? It's pretty much a steal. HEC actually makes their own power supplies, and from what I can tell, these power the innards of IBM servers. It was cheap and so far, on the equipment listed above it's been a rock.
 
There's been a few threads about these already but several months ago. I may have posted one of them. I've used 3-5 of these already for low end systems and they seem to be doing fine for over a year or so but this is not an indication that it is not a "gimmick rating because my system is running well." You can't really judge the quality or ratings based on how it performs on one or even a few systems. You need a much larger sample size for typical home usage or an objective and extensive stress test that only a few sites have the equipment to perform.

If trash PSU's used in most systems out there always blew up within a month they couldn't sustain themselves even at their super cheap prices. If 20 out of every 100 of these blew up in several months, it would hardly be considered a quality unit although by these stats you'd still have an 80% chance of having your system run fine at the time of your posting :)

I don't have any problem using these on cheap/spare systems but I wouldn't say that I have enough evidence to call these things good units. They're as good as any unit in the $25 price range I can think of though, but that's not saying much.
 
Oh, and HEC does make a lot of PSU's for servers but not the Orion series. These $25 PSU's do NOT power the innards of any IBM servers that I'm aware of.
 
So far, I haven't seen a post where anyone had one of these blow up, though. I've seen "it works fine" a number of times. I've also seen a lot of posts where people assumed they couldn't possibly be very good because they don't cost a lot, and I'm curious if this is a diamond in the rough type bargain.

It seems to work fine with the setup it's powering, but this isn't a gaming box - I have the 6800GT (AGP) in there because that's the only AGP card I have left these days.

I'm curious about these, and haven't seen much information about them. I'd really like to see some numbers that test the true output of these.
 
Yes, I'd like to see JohnnyGuru test one of these. Unfortunately the one I have is currently in use. Maybe he'll test one. So far mine is okay, but it is a bit loud. It's sitting in a different room, though, so it doesn't bother me.
 
I read somewhere that someone opened one of these up and it had teapo caps in it. I can't find the link, but the person noting this seemed to think that teapo caps were an indication of quality. I don't even know what those are, so I'll leave it to the experts to make that determination.
 
Capacitors. Teapo is crap for mobo's, but in the world of PSU's, they're wonderful: PCP&C, Zippy, Etasis, etc.. they all use them.
 
Thank you for the explanation, BBQ. I'm still trying to find the picture of the inside of it showing the teapo capacitors and the link.

I just can't help myself; I am an eternal bargain hunter and if I can get something with fewer frills, but more functionality at a great price, it makes my day (or week).
 
Caffeinated said:
So far, I haven't seen a post where anyone had one of these blow up, though. I've seen "it works fine" a number of times. I've also seen a lot of posts where people assumed they couldn't possibly be very good because they don't cost a lot, and I'm curious if this is a diamond in the rough type bargain.

It seems to work fine with the setup it's powering, but this isn't a gaming box - I have the 6800GT (AGP) in there because that's the only AGP card I have left these days.

I'm curious about these, and haven't seen much information about them. I'd really like to see some numbers that test the true output of these.
Click to expand...

So would I. My kids' PC uses the Orion 585.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top