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The Test.Right, how do you test this bugger ? It's not that difficult actually. We can go all geek with multimeters and funky monitoring gear but I always settle for real-world experiences. We took an NFORCE4 Intel SLI edition mainboard with a 3.2 GHz processor (watercooled) and 1 GB DDR2 memory, and then inserted one more GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB to have two of them in SLI mode, and also inserted a DVD-Writer. Then we overclocked the processor by raising the FSB and got the CPU towards ~4000 MHz (yes, there was an obvious reason why we watercooled the PC ;).
Once overclocked, we fired up some benchmarking software and looped gaming timedemo's for a couple of hours .. during that process we actually dared and burnt a DVD in the background. Sounds silly ? I guaran-friggin-tee you, we have passed the 500 Watts ...
The system within minutes peaked at over 500 Watts while benchmarking the system in the environment we created.
When we look at BIOS results we notice that all voltage levels are really stable, and only very minor fluctuations could be seen in the order of .1 volts, which is perfectly fine. Once in the BIOS however your system really doesn't do much, and monitoring this mainboards voltage levels with NVIDIA's NTUNE does not work at this time.
Sound - bizarre enough we have to include a quick stroll regarding noise levels these days. I've had cheap PSU's in this office that likely could have functioned as active rotating helicopter blades when they got a little hot. This PSU doesn't need much wording in this regard though, it simply is very silent. The heat on the inside of the PC is being sucked outside the PC creating a airflow. The housing of the PSU is pierced everywhere as the bigger part has a mesh, so hot air traveling in an upwards direction will partly be ventilated towards the outside where colder air is due to ventilation. At maximum speed the fan will spin at 2000 RPM, which is really silent and since it's a 120mm fan, the airflow is more than sufficient to cool the PSU.
We also burned some CD's on the rig as that requires a stable power supply. Okay you get the idea already, stable as a rock and all that without any additional sound from a fan. Pretty "energetic" stuff.
Now then, you've had a peek at the photo's, combined all factors, and now you should have a pretty broad idea of how this PSU would function for your current or future PC. Quite honestly, I did my best. In a 3D intensive test run with 100% utilization in an overclocked environment with at one point even DVD burning in the background.
This little toddler is stable for sure.
