What is the Best 600W+ PSU?

FSP Aurum CM Gold 650 Review

Manufacturer: FSP
UK price (as reviewed): MSRP £100 (inc VAT)
US price (as reviewed): $155.99 (ex tax)

FSP has been in the PSU-making business for a long time, and builds PSUs for other companies too. The company’s own range of PSUs covers all areas of the market from budget to enthusiast and, at £100, the Aurum CM Gold 650 is its latest foray into the more premium end of the market.

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The Aurum CM certainly looks the part, as its gold detailing and tightly braided black cables have a pleasant, premium feel to them. The arrow-patterned vents also look good, although we’re dubious about FSP’s claim that the shape of the vents ‘allows natural aero dynamics to improve air extraction.’

Like many of the other premium PSUs in this test, the Aurum CM is also a modular PSU. This means that those who don’t need to use all of the eight SATA connections or all of the five Molex connections can leave some of the cables in the box, leading to less clutter in their case. We were also pleased to see that the modular cables were flattened, so they should be easier to hide behind a motherboard tray.

Meanwhile, the four 12V rails of the Aurum CM are each rated at 18A, which looks a little weedy compared with many of the other PSUs here. They can still output up to 50A across the four rails, though, but if you’re pushing the PSU close to its rated output, you’ll want to balance the load carefully.

As with all the 600W+ PSUs, apart from Jou Jye and SevenTeam’s offerings, the Aurum CM is equipped with four PCI-E connections, all of which are of the preferred 6+2-pin variety. We’re aware that only high-end GPUs use the extra two pins of the 6+2-pin connectors at the moment, but these connections give you more choice when it comes to upgrades in the future.

At 50 per cent load, the Aurum CM proved perfectly stable, but the unit struggled to output the correct voltages at 100 per cent load. We saw the 5V rail dip down to 4.69V, which is below the 4.75V that the ATX spec states should be the minimum amount for this rail. This is a disappointing result and means that the Aurum CM could struggle to keep a powerful PC running stably. At least the PSU ran at a relatively decent 89 per cent efficiency when at full load.

The silver lining for the Aurum CM is that it’s one of the few PSUs to pass both our holdup time tests. However, it fared relatively poorly in the ripple test, exhibiting 38.2mV of ripple from its 12V rails. Of course, stability is the most important characteristic in a PSU and there’s no getting away from the fact that the Aurum CM failed in this respect. As a result, we recommend giving it a miss.