The inside of the Zalman features two large aluminum heatsinks…
And the inside of the Ahanix features those same two large aluminum heatsinks. As it turns out these sinks actually come from the Fortron PSU design, they are not unique to the Zalman as I previously thought.
Both of the PSU’s have fans that are of the automatic temperature sensing variety. The one area where the Ahanix has it over the Zalman is that its fan is simply capable of spinning slower. As before, I used my Antec PSU tester to power on both power supplies without an accompanying computer to test only the noise level coming from the PSU. The Zalman’s lowest noise level is about 19db. The Ahanix was able to beat this, it was capable of an astonishing 14.8db according to my SPL meter. That’s low enough to make any Papst, Vantec Stealth, and even Zalman fan green with envy. After running a 3DMark2001 loop for a few hours with both PSU’s the noise level increased a bit, but still an extremely quiet 23-25db for each.
