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.

ATI Radeon AIW X1800XL
Intel Pentium 4 EE 3.46ghz @ 3.8ghz
Abit AW8 Max
2x512mb Corsair DDR2 667
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 x 80mm case fans
2 x Cold cathode tubes

Windows XP SP2
DirectX 9.0c
Catalyst 5.11 WHQL

Far cry 1.3
Photoshop cs 2
3dMark05
DivX Converter 6.0.3
ATI MMC 9.10
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).

Before we began testing we noted the idle voltages for the unit and here they are:

As you can see from the above graphic the Liberty 400w provides almost perfect voltages across the various lines. The +3.3v figure is a little lower than we would have liked at idle however it did sit solidly at 3.28v and never moved which was a promising sign.

Torture test 1: Gaming.
For this test we looped a Farcry benchmark on 1600x1200 4aa 16af and obtained the voltages at 15minute intervals.

dont have flash installed? then click here for a jpeg image of the graph

Torture Test 2: Image Work
For this test we loop the DH Photoshop benchmark on a 200mb image and again take the voltages at 15minute intervals. Prime 95 is also running in the background.

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Torture Test 3: Video Conversion
Out third test consists of DivX Converter encoding a MPEG-2 file to DivX format. Additionally ATI MMC is converting an Mpeg4 file to Mpeg2 at the same time. The voltages were taken every 15 minutes, again Prime95 is running in the background.

dont have flash installed? then click here for a jpeg image of the graph

Torture Test 4: Synthetic Gaming
Our final test involves looping Futuremarks 3dmark05 continually whilst prime 95 runs in the background. Voltages were again recorded at 15minute intervals.

dont have flash installed? then click here for a jpeg image of the graph