Introduction
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Dynex and Rocketfish are two brands owned by Best Buy sold only on their chain of retail stores (and also on their website, of course). Today we are going to review Dynex 400 W, which is a relabeled Huntkey Green Star 400 W power supply and targeted to the entry-level market. Costing USD 80, is it worth the price? Can it really deliver 400 W? Read on.
Dynex and Rocketfish power supplies are manufactured by Huntkey, and we were very curious to review these power supplies from Best Buy for two reasons. First, with more than 1,000 stores worldwide you can find at least one Best Buy store in every major American city. So these power supplies can be found on every corner of the country. Second, we had already reviewed a Huntkey power supply that couldn’t deliver its labeled power, so we were really interested in knowing if that was a problem with that particular model or if all Huntkey models are labeled with a power capacity higher than they can actually deliver.
Dynex 400 W is in fact a relabeled Green Star 400 W and since we had already reviewed the 450 W version from this series – which exploded when we tried to pull its labeled power – we were really curious to know if the all models from Green Star series explode or if this is a problem only with the 450 W model. We were also very curious to see what the internal differences between the 400 W and the 450 W models are.
Figure 1: Dynex 400 W power supply.
Figure 2: Dynex 400 W power supply.
This power supply uses a 120 mm fan on its bottom and it doesn’t come with any PFC circuit.
On Best Buy and Dynex websites the complete specifications for this power supply is missing –they don’t talk about efficiency, for example. On the other hand, the product box and the websites are accurate in describing the available protections (SCP, OCP and OVP). The real problem, however, is Huntkey’s website. They say “85% high efficiency performance,” which is clearly a lie. If you scroll down you can see the correct information, “70% min.” And how about “Support Vista operating system with Direct X 9.0 and Direct X 10 graphic card”? Since when the power supply has something to do with the operating system?
This power supply comes with a 24-pin motherboard cable (it comes with an adapter for you to convert this plug into a 20-pin one), an ATX12V cable and four peripheral cables: one auxiliary power cable for video cards with a 6-pin connector, one cable with three standard peripheral power connectors and one floppy disk drive power connector, one cable with two standard peripheral power connectors and one SATA power connector and one cable with three SATA power plugs.
The number of cables is perfect for entry-level PCs with just one video card or even with on-board video.
This power supply uses 18 AWG and 20 AWG wires. The main motherboard cable, the ATX12V cable and the peripheral cable containing two standard peripheral power connectors and one SATA power connector use 18 AWG wires, while all other cables use 20 AWG wires, including the video card auxiliary power cable. As we always mention, we like to see all wires being 18 AWG.
On the aesthetic side all wires are protected with a nylon sleeving, but this protection doesn’t come from inside the power supply housing.
Now let’s take an in-depth look inside this power supply.