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Features

      Fortron Source has given its Blue Storm a face lift in the form of a very large single 120mm fan and a thick layer of semi-gloss blue paint. I personally like the look of the Blue Storm and it goes well with any modded case. The Blue Storm also has pre-sleeved cables which is a nice break for us since we usually end up sleeving them asap.

The 120mm fan provides plenty of cooling.

      You get a pretty good package including the 20 pin adapter, pre-sleeving, ATX power cable, and a small instruction booklet. You can't see it in the pictures but this power supply is the heaviest power supply I have ever come across. I'd say it weighs twice as much as the TT 480W Butterfly its replacing on our AMD test rig. Perhaps I'm a little old, but I truly believe that if a PSU has weight to it that its going to be made of some quality electrical components.

      This picture doesn't illustrate the length of the wiring that the Fortron Source really has. It sure is nice to look at too. You get every ATX standard with the Blue Storm, which makes it a great value. I especially like all of the circuit protection that the Blue Storm comes with.

     Here is a better picture of the sleeved power leads. Eight 4 pin Molex connections, one floppy, 2 SATA, a 4 & 6 pin 12v ATX, and your main ATX plug gives you plenty of options for case mods and all your peripherals.

Here are the SATA and 6 pin connections for the newer PCI-E vid cards.

The 4 pin and 24 pin ATX plugs. (24pin to 20pin adapter not shown)

You can't forget the cool Blue LED lit switch! :)

      The Fortron Source Blue Storm ax500A is such a fine power supply that we were able to witness a huge improvement in overall system performance, overclockability, and stability. Our A64 test bed proved to be a bit finicky about wanting to be overclocked until we took out the tired old TT 480W, and put the AX500A in its place. As if a miracle took place we no longer had any of the problems such as BSOD's, and an unstable overclock. I had no idea that a power supply, much less a 20W improvement would have that kind of impact. What it all comes down to is quality, and the AX500-A reeks of it. Its almost like owning a weapon with its weight and quality. The funny thing is that it doesn't look any better than the TT 480W on paper, but it really did cure all our overclocking woes! Simply Amazing!

      We then took it a step further, and decided to look a little further into why Fortron Source PSU's are so good. A simple web search gave us all kinds of wonderful ideas, and since we were right at the borderline of our system's max we wanted to tweak just a bit more. One of the best things that I have heard about Fortron Source PSU's is that all you have to do is crack 'em open and adjust the pots inside for a little more 3.3v, 5v, and 12v line voltage. Much like other adjustable PSU's, the Blue Storm was so simple to turn up that all we had to do was crack it open, hook up a voltmeter, and adjust the pots that had an impact on our system voltages. Since the Blue Storm already had decent 3.3v, 5v, and 12v rails (3.34v, 4.97v, 11.94v) under load, we decided not to turn the pots to far, but to reach a happy medium that would yield us just a few more amp's for our overclocking endeavors. We ended up with 3.47v, 5.6v, and 12.74 before we got a little timid with a metal screwdriver inside a running power supply. We were able to get another 25Mhz out of our system, and even more stability under load to the point that there was only a 2Mhz difference between our benchmarking overclock, and the daily setting. DO NOT TRY TO DO THIS UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING! CLUBOC WILL NOT TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY INJURIES AS A RESULT OF PLAYING WITH DANGER!. Ok now that we have that out of the way, I'm going to go ahead and give the FS AX500-A our ClubOC Recommended Seal Of Approval simply because you can go out and spend half the amount of money on a power supply that should cost twice as much!