| PC Power and Cooling 750 Quad Black Power Supply
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Testing:
To test the performance of the PC Power and Cooling 750 Quad Black Power Supply, it was installed into a system with the following equipment:
» 1x ASUS K8N-DL nVidia nForce4 Professional motherboard
» 2x AMD Opteron 270 processors (4x 2.0GHz cores)
» 2x Thermalright Ultra-90 coolers with 92mm Panaflo fans
» 4x 512MB HP Branded Micron PC3200 DDR REG memory
» 2x 1024MB Corsair Branded Micron PC3200 DDR REG memory
» 1x 750GB Western Digital SATA 3.0 Gbps drive
» 1x 750GB Seagate SATA 3.0 Gbps drives
» 1x 200GB Seagate SATA 1.5 Gbps drive
» 1x 300GB Maxtor eSATA 1.5 Gbps drive
» 1x 256 MB HIS IceQ X1300XT Turbo PCIe graphics
» 1x PATA DVDRW
» 1x PATA CD-ROM
» 1x Firewire DVDRW
» Thermaltake Armor full tower case with 2x 120mm and 1x 92mm fans
» USB bus powered devices:
» 1x Gravis Gamepad
» 1x Mitsumi floppy drive
» 1x VoIP phone handset
» 1x Logitech Easy Call desktop
» 1x 8GB Corsair Flash Survivor
» Windows XP Professional (current)
As a point of comparison, the Silencer 750 was tested head-to-head with an Enermax Liberty 500W unit which had been powering this system previously. While this unit offers a much lower total power rating, it is similar in its high efficiency and its 0.99 power factor value.
The first phase of testing involved monitoring the three main voltage rails (3.3V, 5V, and 12V) during idle and load conditions using a Radio Shack digital multimeter (Cat. No. 22-810). The idle condition was established by allowing the system described above to sit at the Windows desktop with no applications running for a period of at least 30 minutes. The load condition was established by overclocking slightly (5%), running the SMP version of Folding@Home so all four cores were active, using SyncBack to transfer data from one drive to two others, and running OCCT to stress the CPU and system memory. What I will refer to the "load+" condition takes the initial load condition and connects a Seasonic brand "Loader", which can generate up to 148W on the 5V and 12V rails (as used in this review).
The chart below details the findings, and although multimeter data provides just a split second of information, there was more to it than that. The multimeter was used to monitor each line a few different times during testing, and for several minutes each time.
With the Silencer 750 installed, there was only one rail that changed at all, and that was the 5V rail when moving from idle to load conditions, and it dropped a whopping 0.01V. While monitoring the rails, it could be seen that all values were static, as the display never moved from the initial value shown, no matter what the load. If it said 12.08V when the multimeter was connected, it read 12.08 all the way up to the time when I disconnected it.
The same could not be said for the Enermax Liberty's performance. First of all, the multimeter generally displayed different values on each rail during each phase of testing. Then those values were not static, as the display would bounce back and forth between different values in the range of those used in the chart above. For example, when the multimeter read 12.25V, you would get the occasional fluctuation in the range of 12.24V to 12.28V.
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