Introduction
A couple of days' ago we dropped the shootout bomb on a set of PSUs in the 400W to 500W range. Aimed at the user with a healthy PC spec. and one eye on future upgrades, Steve's analysis of units in that range showed that there's still the odd stinker in amongst a myriad of different, competent supplies, and that from those good PSUs you largely choose based on cable runs, price and output power. That's just how it should be.Today sees our analysis move up the scale to PSUs in the 600W to 700W range, be that an on-the-box number or otherwise. PSUs with that kind of true output power ability are for the very high-end power user, and definitely one with dual graphics cards, probably overclocked along with their CPU and memory (and lots of it), and with a storage array probably approaching or topping the terabyte mark.
What we'll call workstation-class PCs are those on the market today that demand a PSU with outlandish output power, rail options and cabling runs to suit. You'll know instantly if you need one, and the likely spec. of such a PC means that you have the money to spend to grab a supply like those on test today. So to help you choose one from many, we've nabbed over half-a-dozen PSUs with high-end aspirations and subjected them to our test equipment. Read on to see what we found out.
Notes
To save us a page on the test setup, look here to our 400W-500W roundup to see how we did things. James did all the testing using much the same test harness that I did back during the Complete And Utter Mother Of All PSU Roundups In The World, Ever, last year.The rig lets us load up any rail on the PSU with a multi-kilowatt capacity, using a dedicated harness supply (Chroma 61604 Programmable AC Source) which we made spit out U.K. mains juice. That page has all the details, so hit it up if you want to know more.
