Test Setup

Procedure

Professional power testing equipment can be very expensive. Although it will give a full and comprehensive test, it's not really need in this case. Our simple tests described below is enough, for our purpose of "real life" testing ... with real components and end user's point of view.

Again for our tests, we used our HydroBox III system, which consists of the following components listed above. We also used a power hungry Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 processor (B3 stepping), along with a pair of ATI Radeon HD3870s in Crossfire mode. Other components include OCZ's DDR3-1800 PC3-14400 2Gb kit, 2 x Sony 18x DVD R/W drives, 1 x Western Digital Caviar 250Gb hard drive, and 1 x Maxtor 120Gb Hard drive. All of which will increase the total power consumption.

To really stress test the PSU ... we ran several demanding games at a monitor resolution of 1920x1200 (this will give a good balance between hefty GPU usage whilst using the CPU at maximum as well). We then added 4 extra 120mm chassis fans (1 rear, 1 front and 2 on the radiator), and overclocked our Q6600 to 3.6Ghz (8x450). Vcore voltages was increased to 1.55v, while the DDR3 ram was increased to 2.1v.

As I explained in our last power supply review, our HydroBox system is equipped with a 240W Peltier TEC unit, which sits between a pure copper coldplate and the Swiftech Apogee GTX waterblock. Now, normally this Peltier TEC unit would be powered by a separate dedicated 300W power supply due to its massive drain on the ampage and +12V lines. It can draw upto a massive 240W @ 24A depending on the conditions. Call me crazy ... I don't care, but I decided to plug the Peltier TEC unit directly to one of the 4-pin molex. Now, if this ain't a stress test ... then I don't know what is.

To measure the power consumption, we used a digital multimeter which measures the amount of watts the system is currently using. From the screenshot, the meter reading gives an average of 375 watts running Windows Vista ... and that's with the system powered on (overclocked with Peltier TEC unit plugged in + Crossfire enabled). When the system is at full load, the wattage peaks around 568 watts.