Load testing the PSU

Load testing the PSU

As you can see, we had a bit of a challenge at hand. I mean without professional Chroma load testers it's pretty hard to stress a power supply of this class and actually measure its behavior.

So here's what we did. We took an X58 Quad SLI compatible motherboard, armed it with two GeForce GTX 590 cards (two GPUs per card) and then add another GeForce GTX 580 just for PhysX. So we use a total of 5 GPU's.

The X58 motherboard we combine with a Core i7 960 processor overclocked to 4 GHz. The result, well have a look:

So we add in another a GeForce GTX 580 purely for dedicated PhysX as well. Software wise it will be a daunting task to stress everything, but we'll surely try ;)

These are the components used:

• eVGA X58 Classified 4-way SLI motherboard (has high power consumption)
• Core i7 960 Extreme (overclocked to 4 GHz)
• 2x GeForce GTX 590 primary (4 GPUs)
• 1x GeForce GTX 580(PhysX)
• 6 GB Memory DDR3 @ 1600 MHz
• Optical Drive x1
• SDD x1

Now two years ago we'd reach 750 Watts power consumption as maximum. But with power supplies getting more and more efficient these days even that proves to be a very hard task to accomplish. With a 1350 Watt PSU that task is increasingly difficult.

Above out graphics card setup. Now on the software side of things it is time to give the PC a beating, and that's a hard thing to do. Gaming wise we average out at roughly 600~650 Watt. It is with a combination of game stress and physx stress tests that we can raise our previous limit of 750 Watt. Let's have a look at the test results.

 For this test run we simply monitor a professional watt-meter (thus we measure at the wall socket). And yeah, we reach roughly 960 Watt of power consumption (on the wall socket side) -- dang !

The reality is very interesting, where we had a hard time passing 750W two years ago and with PSUs and hardware getting more energy efficient we finally have a nice stress test setup that sucks up close to a kilowatt.

Some notes here. Powered down the PSU consumes little to no current, we measured ~1 Watts MAX only.

In suspend to RAM or hybrid power mode the PSU kicks in nicely, we see slightly less then 3 Watt power consumption.

The system in idle with one card utilizes just under 200W and with 5 cards installed roughly 300W, I expected worse TBH. As stated we had a maximum peak power draw of just under a full kilowatt with our system setup.

Great stuff really and on par with a lot of other high quality high efficiency PSUs we've tested.

And sure reading out the devices, display adapters in specific, remains a weird weird weird thing to observe alright. It's a heck of a lot of fun though :)