Testing

To test the power supply, I will run the rig for a few days to ‘break it in’. After this, I will run my PC for awhile doing basic tasks like word processing, checking emails etc. I will then use SpeedFan to read off the rails.

After this is completed, I will run my rig with every little peripheral I can find and at full load to see how well it survives in a really intense situation.

The rails should be exact or above the name of the rail. For example, the 3.3v rail should be 3.3v or above. If the rail drops below the voltage, then there will be issues with the system such as random restarts and slow downs. However, if the rails are too high, e.g 4v then there will be other issues that come into play, including fried components on add-on cards and even the mobo itself.

Results

Before I start, I noticed that there was a substantial increase in my systems performance when I installed the PSU. This is probably because my old PSU had dodgy rails and wasn’t supplying my rig with the correct voltages. And remember, stable voltages mean better overclocks :D.

Shows before load then during intense load

During testing, I kept the turbo mode enabled to make sure that overheating was not an issue in changing the rail output. My PC is notoriously hot :)

As we can see from the results, the 3.3v rail does not change at all. The 5v rail change is pretty much negligible. However, when under load the 12v rail suffers a lot; whilst .23v isn’t a great amount, the 12v rail drips below the golden 12v mark. Whilst this won’t have any detrimental effects on your system at the moment, as the PSU ages this rail will lower further and further.

The rails themselves are very respectable for such a power supply, and the PCIe connectors are very welcome, it’s just a shame that two PCIe power leads aren’t supplied for SLI.