8 - Load testing the PSU

 
Load testing the PSU

Testing A PSU in theory it's not that difficult, stressing a 600+ Watt PSU, now that's a little different.

Fact is that we do not have the gear in house to be able to stress this PSU to it's full capacity. We can connect everything we want, add more devices and overclock, but even then we'd normally peak at 500-550 Watts. But hey, as always let's try that out and see what happens.

So here's what we did. We took:

• eVGA Force 750i ULTRA SLI mainboard (consumes heaps of current)
• Core 2 Quad Q6600 Processor (overclocked to 3.6 GHz)
• 1x GeForce 9800 GX2

So to stress a little more we overclocked the CPU cores towards 3.6 GHz, had the DDR2 memory running at 1147 MHz.

For the test we nowadays use Call of Duty Four, enable high IQ settings and have a go with it at 1600x1200.
It's really nasty on graphics cards; it makes them sweat. We recently I added Call of Duty 4 as it's also multi-core threading. The balance of these settings also ensures me that that the CPU is utilized as much as can be. Now at this point I realized that we're stressing the PSU slightly. So we added fan's, some extra lighting, water-cooling.

Good, let's tap some voltage eager rails.

The 5 volts rail monitored, tapped from the HDD.

The 12V2 volts rail monitored, tapped from the HDD. Very constant levels.

The 12V3 volts rail monitored, tapped from the GeForce 9800 GX2.