Enermax Revolution 85+ 850W review

PSU - Power Supply Units 108 Page 6 of 8 Published by

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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.

So here's what we did. I decided to take a power hungry nForce 790i SLI motherboard. Then took 2x GTX 295 (four GPUs) for maximum power consumption.

Then we popped in another GeForce GTX 280 purely for PhysX as well. Next:  we took a power hungry QX9770 processor and overclocked it towards 3600 MHz. Then we overclocked our memory as well.

These are the components used:

  • nForce 790i motherboard (has high power consumption
  • Core 2 Quad QX 9770 Processor (overclocked to 3.6 GHz)
  • 2x GeForce GTX 295 primary (4 GPUs)
  • 1x GeForce GTX 280 (PhysX)
  • 3 GB Memory DDR3 @ 1600 MHz
  • Optical Drive x1
  • HDD x1

Normally, we'd reach 700 Watt power consumption. But with power supplies getting more and more efficient these days .. that proofs to be a very hard task to accomplish. We gave it our best though. Let's have a look at the test results.

In the screenshot you can see the five GPUs we have installed and activated in this PC. For our test we used several pieces of software including the Cryostasis PhysX Demo which allows us to go hard on the GTX 295 (Quad SLI) AND ALSO use Physx on the additional GeForce GTX 280. For this test runs we simply monitor the watt-meter (thus we measure at the wall socket)

Enermax Revolution 850WMinor label error in the chart - the GTX mentioned 275 is in fact a GTX 280

The reality is harsh, with all that equipment and tweaks we just could not pass ~700 Watts load. A year or two ago with this very system we'd have passed 800 Watts easily. But not only do PC components get more efficient, PSUs themselves are becoming more and more efficient and green as well, in the end saving on overall power draw from the wall socket.

Some notes here. Powered down the PSU consumes very little current, we measured 2~3 Watts only. And again, though we had so much gear plugged into his system, the power consumption remained fairly low, making me believe that 85%~90% power efficiency is very likely.

Great stuff really and on par with a lot of other High Quality PSU's we tested.

For those interested, you can download the Cryostatis PhysX Demo and give it a try yourself.

BFG EX 1200 Watt PSU

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