Installation

As with any other power supply the installation phase is pretty easy. You might have to remove your motherboard or just your CPU cooler, although most should be fine. Unfortunately, all the power that the Strider provides means that the length of the unit has been extended by about an inch compared to a standard ATX PSU. This could be a problem if you have a tiny media PC case but a standard desktop case owner will be fine.

As everything about this power supply is modular, once you’ve screwed it into position, you then have to connect all of the cables. I personally find that modular cables allow for easier cable management and you can normally hide them better too.

The solid EPS 8 pin plug is very useful if you have a hidden or hard to reach 8 pin EPS socket on your motherboard (e.g. underneath your CPU cooler).

As 1000W is far more than even an above average computer will pull, we decided that the red-neck testing facility needed an upgrade…

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

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

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 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 any of the computers fail (crashes) then the power supply has not passed the testing.