Review: FSP Aurum Pro 1000W

If you’ve ever bought a PC power supply branded as Antec, OCZ, Silverstone, Thermaltake or Zalman, there is a chance that your unit was actually made by Taiwanese company FSP. That’s the abbreviated form of the infinitely cooler-sounding Fortron Source Power.

FSP has been making power supplies for about twenty years, but only in the last ten has it sold any under its own brand name. It recently sent us a PSU rated at 1000W from the Aurum Pro series, which also includes 850W and 1200W versions.

Available from NZ online stores for under $300, it’s currently on the cheaper end of the scale for 1000W power supplies. It certainly doesn’t present itself as a budget unit however. It looks sleek, and professional, housed in a rugged black-and-gold casing with a unique hexagonal fan grill covering the 135mm cooling fan.

Under the hood things seem no less impressive, with a single 12-volt rail rated to deliver up to a whopping 83 amps – or 996 Watts – at over 87% efficiency according to its 80 Plus Gold certification. To put this in perspective, a decent graphics card or a high-speed, quad-core CPU will generally draw under 200W, so this unit is well equipped to power a dual or triple-GPU gaming rig or powerhouse workstation.

The cabling design of the Aurum Pro 1000W is semi-modular, with the main cables such as the 24-pin motherboard and 8-pin CPU connectors hardwired to the unit. The numerous molex, SATA and PCI-E cables are bundled into detachable, flattened rubber runners.

Sadly we lack any fancy PSU-testing gadgetry in the lab. Having said that, we can confirm it happily runs a heavily overclocked Core-i5 gaming rig with dual AMD HD7850 GPUs. If the more scientific torture-tests we have seen online are anything to go by, it easily cuts the mustard even compared to the more well-known brands in the PSU world.