Installation

Installation isn’t particularly difficult; as with any other power supply. As its modular your job is made slightly earlier as you don’t have to deal with an octopus of cables.

The most annoying part was trying to get the 4+4pin connector into the motherboard. As it’s a split type connector – to allow backwards compatibility – it slides apart and they don’t stick together. This is fine if you have easy access to your motherboards socket, but if – like us – you have to contort your hand underneath an oversized CPU heatsink, it becomes a pain in the ass very fast.

After plumbing everything into place, it was time for the power on. However, we don’t do things like most, and decided it was time for an even more extreme red-neck testing platform.

Testing

Our testing consists of a main PC, and then another two slave PC’s. This is our most extreme testing that we’ve done to a power supply thus far, so if this unit makes it out of the other side, it’ll get my seal of approval.

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

The main PC has everything powered by the Mach 1, and the slave PC’s have everything bar their motherboard being supplied by the Mach 1.

All of the PC’s were powered up and then left for 30 minutes to allow the rails to stabilise, and then the motherboard reading of the rails was taken, and backed up by a multimeter from a spare (but hard to find) molex connector.

Then the heat was turned up, and all of the machines had to run full screen (1280x1024) RTHDRIBL, the main PC had a instance of S&M running on both cores, an instance of folding@home and the Physx Cloth demo running with the Space bar held down (shoots balls and gives the Physx card something to sweat about). The slave PC uno also had the Physx Cloth demo running.

This setup was left for another 30 minutes and the rails taken with their highest and lowest recorded. If the setup fails then the power supply can’t take the pressure cap’in.