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While we don't have a very scientific way of testing PSU's here at Hexus, we can still test PSU's in the best way possible, putting them in a production machine that gets solid daily use and seeing how it handles the load.
So while you wont see multimeter readings or anything like that, I can tell you how it performed in a high end system compared to my usual power supply and comment on the noise side of things.
Here's the test system.
• FSP FSP300-60ATX (PF) ATX Power Supply (300W)
• Enermax EG465P-VE ATX Power Supply (431W)
• Intel Pentium 4 3.06GHz Processor
• ABIT IT7-MAX Socket 478 DDR Motherard (i845E chipset)
• Sapphire Radeon 9700 Atlantis Pro
• 512MB Mushkin PC2700 DDR Memory
• Adaptec 39160 Dual Channel PCI SCSI Controller
• 2 x 73GB Seagate Cheetah 10,000rpm U160 68-pin SCSI LVD
• 1 x 18.3GB Seagate Cheetah X15 15,000rpm 80-pin SCSI SCA
• Pioneer DVD-303 6x SCSI DVD-ROM
• 1 x 80GB Seagate Barracuda IV 7200rpm IDE
Basically the fastest hardware I had to hand including my Sapphire R9700 Pro (which needs a dedicated power feed) and my old SCSI hardware packed in (sans CDRW) to give the PSU's a decent amount of load.
The ABIT IT7-MAX was chosen for its overclocking abilities (and the lovely ability to lock PCI and AGP clocks which the R9700 Pro and Adaptec card are very thankful for).
If you remember back to the 3.06GHz P4 review here on Hexus, you'll see the processor did just over 3.7GHz in the IT7-MAX with air cooling, so with the same air cooling and the SCSI hardware in for extra PSU load it was interesting to see how high I could get again with each PSU driving the system.
The faster the processor is pushed, the more power it needs to operate so it's a valid, if somewhat unscientific, test of a PSU's abilities.
The 2nd test was to overclock the processor to its maximum 100% stable level so that SETI was able to run without problems, and then use Motherboard Monitor 5.1.9.1 to monitor the voltage lines from the onboard sensor hardware and take a high/low and average reading from some of the voltage sensors, over a 6 hour SETI run (around 3 units).
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