Cooler Master Elite Power 350 W Power Supply Review

Introduction

We also like to review low-end products from time to time so people with a serious budget restriction can have an idea whether it is worthwhile to buy cheap products or not. Today we are going to take an in-depth look at the Elite Power 350 W (RS-350-PSAR-I3) from Cooler Master. Can it really deliver its rated power? Is it worthwhile giving it a shot if you don’t have a lot of money to spend on a power supply? Let’s see.

Cooler Master uses all sort of vendors for their power supplies. This particular model is manufactured by Solytech, but the 400 W and 460 W models from the same series are manufactured by FSP, therefore this particular model is a completely different animal. On their other low-end series, Extreme Power and Extreme Power Plus, Cooler master uses another two vendors, AcBel Polytech and Seventeam, depending on the model. And they also use other vendors for their other power supply series. Phew!

Figure 1: Cooler Master Elite Power 350 W power supply

Figure 2: Cooler Master Elite Power 350 W power supply

The Cooler Master Elite Power 350 W is 5 ½” (14 cm) deep, using a 120-mm sleeve bearing fan on its bottom (Globe Fan S1202512L). This unit does not feature a PFC circuit, as you can see by the presence of a 115 V/230 V switch in Figure 1, being based on the outdated half-bridge topology.

No modular cabling system is provided and cables don’t have a nylon protection. The cables included are:

• Main motherboard cable with a 20/24-pin connector, 16.9” (43 cm) long
• One cable with two ATX12V connectors that together form one EPS12V connector, 18.9” (48 cm) long
• One cable with three SATA power connectors, 13.4” (34 cm) to the first connector, 5.9” (15 cm) between connectors
• One cable with three standard peripheral power connectors and one floppy disk drive power connector, 13.8” (35 cm) to the first connector, 5.9” (15 cm) between connectors

On the good side, all cables use 18 AWG wires, which is the minimum recommended gauge. On the other hand, the cable configuration and reduced number of connectors and lack of a video card power connector clearly shows that we are dealing with a low-end product. Although this unit has three SATA power connectors, you may have trouble installing a SATA hard drive and a SATA optical drive, depending on the distance between them inside your case.

Figure 3: Cables

Let’s now take an in-depth look inside this power supply.