7 - Testing
Very notable is this; with a wattage meter we noticed that wattage did not peak over 500 Watts where other PSU's did have much higher peak loads. Now please remember what I told you about power efficiency. This PSU's efficiency is really good and it's showing. We estimate between 82% and 84% efficiency which is on par with the specification.
With the PC powered down the PSU still still uses near 30 Watts which was a bit odd. Granted; it's really hard to stress PSU's like these. The fact that it remains stone cold at a near 500 Watt power draw however tells me that it can easily cope with the load.
Let's have a look at sound ... ehm, yeah, that's right.
Sound levels (dBA)
As usual we grabbed our dBa meter, enabled the PSU by hot-wiring it and started to listen if it made any significant noise. Short and simple it's really silent. With merely the PSU hotwired and no other electrical devices activated in a closed room we measured a dBA level of roughly 30 dBA. Yes correct ... not even 30 DBa !
The human hearing system has different sensitivities at different frequencies. This means that the perception of noise is not at all equal at every frequency. Noise with significant measured levels (in dB) at high or low frequencies will not be as annoying as it would be when its energy is concentrated in the middle frequencies. In other words, the measured noise levels in dB will not reflect the actual human perception of the loudness of the noise. That's why we measure the dBa level. A specific circuit is added to the sound level meter to correct its reading in regard to this concept. This reading is the noise level in dBA. The letter A is added to indicate the correction that was made in the measurement.
All in all, extremelt silent and thus highly recommended to any of the audiophiles that like silence (yours truly included). As always we measure ~75 CM away from the product (usually the distance between you and a desktop computer).
Quite honestly the 950W MiniPlant Power Supply unit hotwired and activated, it is among the most silent PSUs we've ever tested. Very recommendable.
