Our main overclocking test rig is one that has bust many a PSU in its time, in its various guises. Pulling well over 400W under full load, before now it had only been trusted to either Antec 550W or Enermax EG-651 PSUs for reviews. Its full spec is as follows:
Asetek Vapochill PE super cooler
Asus P4C800-E Deluxe
Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHz (800) @ 4.15GHz
1GB OCZ PC4200 EL-DDR
1x Plextor PX708A DVD RW
1 x Plextor 52x32x52x CD-RW Drive
ATi Radeon 9800 XT 256MB
Asetek Waterchill Chipset and VGA coolers (Hydor L30 pump)
Creative SoundBlaster Audigy Platinum Pro
Floppy disk drive
2 x Western Digital Raptor 74GB Hard Drives
2 x Seagate 160GB ATA100 Hard Drives
Coolermaster Aerogate 2 Rheostat
1 x 120mm Papst fan
3 x 50mm Papst fans
56k modem.
Always a bit risky to trust such an expensive rig to a new PSU, the vapochill thankfully initialised without issue, and cooled down to -10 degrees where I have it set to start up the rest of the system. It is here that some lesser power supplies in the past, including Coolermaster’s Hiper, Q-Tec’s dire 550W and Chieftec’s 420W have given up the ghost either shutting down (Chieftec) or blown an internal component rendering them useless (the other two).
The system initialised properly and booted into windows without issue. I started up the usual Prime 95 and Sandra Burn In stability tests we use at OcPrices and fired up MBM5 to check the rails.
3.3V was at a perfectly acceptable 3.39V, 5V was 5.12V and 12V averaged around 11.98V. At no point did I see the voltage drop below 11.5V even with such a high load. The 12V value may be a little low compared to what you might expect, but that is purely down to the Vapochill. In a “normal” high powered system we saw it averaging around 12.19V – an excellent value.
