kaivorth

I know the 600w is the same as the 700w for the most part, but what about the 500w?

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Chozart

No idea where you get the idea from that the 600W and the 700W are nearly the same... there is a good difference between the current on the 12V rails.

Not sure whether the 500W is based on the same design, but if it is, stay away! The 600W and 700W GameXStream are based on an FSP platform that's known for excessive ripple at high loads. Even though that doesn't affect short-term performance (you'll hear plenty people saying the PSU works great for them), it'll cause damage to components in the long term.

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BlankThis

Same as in by the same company? 700W probably has another 12V rail then the 600W and a higher 12V rail combines amperage.

~B~

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shinji2k

The GameXstream are all built on the same FSP Epsilon platform so they are basically the same, with each successive model having higher capacity from key parts being upgraded. The 500W doesn't have the characteristic ripple and the 600W version really isn't too bad. It only shows up on very high loads and like Chozart said, it can affect your components in the long term. The 700W version starts to have ripple issues at about 400W and gets pretty bad at the top end. So, the 500W is good, the 600 is ok (but you kind of need to treat it like a 500W to avoid ripple issues) and 700W should probably be avoided. FSP does have a revision floating around that fixes these issues but it's not known which PSUs have this.

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Chozart

So all three would make a decent 500W PSU

In any case, I'd probably pick the Corsair VX550 over any of these three.

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kaivorth

Ty for all of your input, rep+ to all. and btw, i read an article (I think from tweaktown...) about how the 600w, the 700w, and the zalman 700w, are basically all the same, just rebranded. The only difference that are really imortant i read about was the zalman had a better heatsink inside

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shinji2k

Pretty much. The 750W and under Zalmans are FSP Epsilons with Zalman's heatpipe design for the heatsinks. Zalman has also tweaked the Epsilon design to eliminate the ripple issue (I can't find exactly what they changed). Because of this, the Zalmans are better than it's siblings (OCZ and many others). Oh and most companies that sell PSUs, contract out other companies to make their units. They go to FSP, Enhance, CWT, Seasonic, etc... (there are many manufacturers, but only a few with their own retail business) and usually pick from an existing product they make and then customize it (different fan, paint, cabling, tweaking internals, etc...) and then slap their label on it.

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