Sadly when a lot of people are shopping for a power supply things like does it have modular cables and styling play a big role. A lot of people forget that buying a quality power supply is important both to protect your components, but also higher power efficiency waists less. With power prices constantly going up every dollar counts, especially when you have more than one gaming PC in your household seeing heavy use. Well one of our event sponsors FSP sent over one of their new 80+ Platinum power supplies. Today I’m going to take a look to see what sets it apart beyond its high efficiency.

Product Name: FSP Aurum 92+ 550 Watt

Review Sample Provided by: FSP

Written by: Wes

Pictures by: Wes

**Disclaimer**

LanOC Reviews only covers the features of power supplies due to not having the equipment to test them up to our standards. Because of this you will not see a performance section, a final verdict, or awards. Therefore we prefer to call this a preview rather than a review. Thank you for understanding; we keep our standard to the absolute highest for you, our reader.

Packaging

FSP ran with the platinum theme right from the start. The Aurum 92+’s packaging is trimmed out in platinum. This includes the branding on the front and a box with the wattage on the cover as well. Also on the cover is a large photo of the platinum trim on the power supply itself. Down in the bottom left corner the included the 80 Plus Platinum logo, a badge showing its 5 year warranty, and a badge that says “USD 5 Millions Product Insurance”. Ignoring million being plural, I assume this means they have insurance just in case there is ever an issue with the Aurum 92+ product line, this is a little weird to have on the cover but I guess it’s a good thing.

The back of the packaging is where most of the power supplies information can be found. There is a full breakdown of the max amperage and wattage for each voltage. Below that you have a feature listing and also Efficiency and Acoustic Noise graphs. Down the middle they have highlighted more features with badges and short explanations. On the right is my favorite part, they have a line drawing of each of the included cables. This documents what is modular and what isn’t as well as how many of each connection type you will get.

When you pull the cover off you will find an all-black box with the FSP logo on the front. Inside the Aurum 92+ is protected with about an inch of foam on each side. The modular cords are in their bag inside of the box on the right side. The power supplies documentation is sitting on top. The non-modular cords are actually hidden under the cardboard that says Play Time.

I will get into all of the random accessories in the next section, but here is a shot of the included User Manual. There isn’t much to it, nor does there need to be.

Photos and Features

I really like the FSP didn’t go crazy with the styling on the Aurum 92+. They gave the entire power supply a nice flat black wrinkle finish that should look good in nearly any build and then added just a touch of platinum trim. The trim is a neutral color as well so if you are trying to match your power supply with your build you aren’t limited.

The top of the Aurum 92+ is extremely simple. They put the power breakdown specifications along with your serial number on a sticker here. You can also find all of the required logos like the CE and FCC logos as well as the 80 Plus Platinum verification.

This is the business end of the Aurum 92+, here we have the five modular power supply connections as well as a small bundle of non-modular cables as well. For permanent cables you get 24 pin and 4+4 cables for your motherboard as well as a 6+2 PCI express cable for your video card. There is a little ventilation up top above the modular connections as well.

The Aurum 92+ has a 120mm fan to keep things cool. Cover it in a hexagon shaped wire fan grill. In the center is the FSP badge. Around the outside of the fan grill is where they slipped in their platinum trim to show off that 80 Plus Platinum rating.

The other half of the venation are of course the exhaust vents. The back end of the Aurum 92+ has the power cord connection, a power switch, and the exhaust ventilation. FSP went with a really interesting design for the cutouts. Depending on how you look at it they could be up or down votes on Reddit or maybe batman symbols. There is more than enough breathing room here to help that 120mm fan breath.

The sides of the Aurum 92+ are covered in the wrinkle paint and have an embossed FSP logo on them.

The overall dimensions of the Aurum 92+ are 150 x 160 x 85. To give a little perspective the smallest you will likely find in the ATX form factor is closer to 140mm. The Aurum 92+ isn’t the smallest power supply, but it falls on the low side of average and on the high side of small. This is about what you would expect from any 550 Watt PSU in this day and age though.

When you dig into the Aurum 92+, on top of the power supply itself, you get a few accessories. For one you get a bundle of cords, I will break those down here in a second. I was a little sad to not see a bad to store your extra cords in though. Thankfully, the Aurum 92+’s cords are distinguished, but I have run into issues in the past where cords have gotten mixed up and you can’t tell what goes with what. In some cases they will work fine, but a few times they were wired differently. You also get a bag with black thumbscrews for installing the power supply and also Velcro wire ties as well.

The first two modular cables I pulled out from the bundle of cables included were the Molex cables. You get two, both have two Molex connections each. One of the two also has a legacy floppy drive connection. I think at this point we can safely say that this connection isn’t really needed anymore. At worse people who do need it could use a Molex to floppy adapter cable. It’s also weird that each of the cables only have two Molex connections, three connections would have been preferred on at least one cable.

On top of the 6+2 cable that is permanently attached to the Aurum 92+, they also include a second modular cable. This means you can run up too two 8-pin connections assuming the power load isn’t any more than 550 watts.

Here is a better look at the flat rubber coated cords that FSP went with. They remind me a lot of a slightly wider version of a SATA data cable. They should be easier to route than a sleeved cable, especially when trying to hide your cables. The black rubber should also blend in more in cases with a black interior. My preference is still the ultra-flexible cables that we have seen on a few power supplies or individually sleeved cables, but this is still a nice option over sleeved or cables without any sleeving at all.

The SATA power cables are the most interesting of all of the cables. One cable is fairly standard with the weird wide rubber cable and three plugs spaced out by about 6 inches, similar to the Molex cables but with a third connection. The second cable is interesting though, they dropped the flat rubber and used sleeving and this cable has four SATA connections. Each connection is spaced out around 2 inches apart. This design is much better for hooking up all of your hard drives in a single hard drive cage without as much of a wiring mess hiding in the back.

Overall

While a lot of you might consider the FSP Autum 92+ to be a bit of a budget power supply. I would like to invite you to check out the power consumption graph from our latest video card review. As you can see below, even under load the only setups that require huge wattage power supplies are the builds with multiple video cards and in some cases the flagship video cards. The latest card from Nvidia the GTX 980 for example only pulled 393 watts under load on our test bench. That includes powering the 6 core Intel CPU and water cooling as well.

With the information above in mind you could comfortably go with something like the 550W Arurum 92+ from FSP for most builds. Not only could you save a little money, but you are also getting a much more efficient power supply with the 80 Plus Platinum certification. The other feature of this power supply that I really liked was the SATA power cable that is layed out in the same what that most cases arrange their hard drive cages. Far to often it feels like power supply manufactures ignore the fact that most of our hard drives aren’t mounted 6-8 inches apart.

Of course, the power supply isn’t perfect. For one it isn’t fully modular, case modders who like to resleeve their cables won’t be a big fan of that. The weird cable sleeving on the current cables won’t make that any easier as well. The current price of the power supply on Newegg is mid-range for a Platinum rated power supply but it is the lowest priced modular modal. Really, the only thing that you have to consider is if going platinum is worth the $20 premium over s similarly optioned gold rated power supply. Other than that the FSP Aurum 92+ looks like a great power supply, at least from the outside. Because we are unable to test the actual performance the way we would like, I would still suggest to keep a close eye on the public reviews posted on both Newegg and Amazon to be completely sure there aren’t any quality issues to watch out for.

Author Bio

Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org

Editor-in-chief

You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.