Performance

When testing a power supply such as this, it’s important to use a high end system with a top of the line processor along with many optical and hard drives. With this in mind we used the following test rig and worked the PSU hard for many hours under heavy loads.

Asus AX800XT @ 550/550
AMD Athlon64 4000+ @2.6ghz
ASUS A8N SLI
2x512mb Corsair Xpert Series PC3200
Samsung 80gb 7200rpm SATA Drive with 8mb Cache
Hitachi 80gb 7200rpm SATA Drive with 8mb Cache
40gb Western Digital IDE drive 7200rpm 2mb cache
Sony 710 Dual Layer DVD writer
NEC 3510 Dual layer DVD Writer
AOC 19” CRT
1.44mb floppy Drive
Creative Audigy 2
4 80mm case fans
2 cold cathode tubes

Windows XP SP2
DirectX 9.0c
Catalyst 5.6 WHQL

Far cry 1.3
Photoshop cs 2
3dMark05
DivX Converter
ATI MMC 9.06
Prime95

The test system was built from scratch, a format of the hard drive was performed (NTFS) and then Windows XP was installed (SP2). Next the chipset drivers were installed. The only update applied was .net framework 1.1(latest service pack). Following a reboot the Video Card drivers were installed. Next the benchmarking tools were installed and finally the hard drive was de-fragmented. For all tests the ATI drivers were set to default quality/optimisations (unless otherwise stated).

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