Testing
Without any specific equipment to test ripple voltages or startup load times, I'll take the Hiper documentation as gospel. Hiper state the HPU-3S350 will be ready at 90% possible sustained load on all rails within 100ms of startup, full 100% load possible 400ms later for a complete 100% boot time of 500ms. Ready to rock in half a second, just like the Tagan.Ripple voltage limits are stated to be no more than 200mV peak-to-peak on any rail, with only 100mV ripple, peak-to-peak, on the +5VSB, +5V and +3.3V outputs. With high-end supplies these days that limit ripple to < 50mV on all rails, the Hiper isn't as competent in that regard, offering a less clean supply. We'll see how that affects testing.
Load Test Results
In the absence of any explicit PSU testing equipment, testing is limited to running an overclocked Athlon 64 testbed, with as many fans and disk drives as I could find, under 3D and CPU intensive loads, monitoring the voltages with Motherboard Monitor. It's barely scientific, but it allows some kind of qualitative assessment and comparison against my long-term supply, an Enermax 431W, and a recent Tagan TG480-U01. Here's the setup.- Hiper HPU-3S350 ATX 2.2 PSU
- Tagan TG480-U01 ATX 2.03 PSU
- Enermax 431 ATX 2.01 PSU
- AMD Athlon 64 Model 3200+, ASUS K8V Deluxe motherboard
- Corsair XMS3200LLPT TwinX 512MB
- ASUS Radeon 9800XT
- Seagate Barracuda ATA IV 80GB PATA HDD
- Western Digital Raptor 36GB SATA HDD
- 3 x 120mm YS-Tech 135cfm fans @ 12V
- Pioneer DVD-106 IDE DVD-ROM
- TX Jupiter 40x IDE CDRW
The disk data copy was scripted to repeat 3 times, deleting the intermediate data when finished. The voltages were measured over that time period, an approximate 35 minute period in which 78GB of data was copied and 3DMark03 and SETI were left running constantly.
So, constant fan, disk, GPU and CPU loads, all pulling on the PSU rails in some capacity and to some extent.
+12V variance results
| PSU | Maximum | Minimum | Adjusted Average |
| Hiper | 12.24 | 11.81 | 12.02 |
| Tagan | 12.14 | 11.99 | 12.01 |
| Enermax | 12.33 | 11.83 | 12.02 |
+5V variance results
| PSU | Maximum | Minimum | Adjusted Average |
| Hiper | 5.09 | 4.83 | 5.01 |
| Tagan | 5.04 | 4.94 | 4.99 |
| Enermax | 5.05 | 4.94 | 5.00 |
+3.3V variance results
| PSU | Maximum | Minimum | Adjusted Average |
| Hiper | 3.41 | 3.30 | 3.31 |
| Tagan | 3.33 | 3.31 | 3.33 |
| Enermax | 3.42 | 3.29 | 3.30 |
The poorer ripple voltage performance of the Hiper makes itself known in the testing, the supply offering higher and lower peak voltages. The adjusted average shows it's competent in supplying close to the target voltage. It performs admirably, a testament to its apparent quality that it didn't have a problem, even when having to use two splitters to get the 8 connectors needed for all the test equipment.
Good results, just less impressive than the Tagan or 2 year old Enermax.
