| Tuniq Miniplant 950W Power Supply
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Installation and Operation:
The Tuniq Miniplant 950W power supply was installed in a system with the following base components for this review:
» Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 dual core processor
» OCZ Technology Vendetta heatpipe CPU cooler
» ASUS P5KC P35 ATX motherboard
» Crucial Ballistix 2GB PC3-12800 DDR3 dual channel memory
» Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD7500AAKS 750GB SATA hard drive
» Seagate Barrcuda 7200.10 750GB SATA hard drive
» 256 MB ASUS Radeon HD3850 TOP PCIe graphics card
» Ultra Products m998 mid-tower case
» ASUS IDE DVDRW
» Fans: 2x 120mm
» Windows XP Professional
This setup was used to test the Miniplant head-to-head with another strong contender, the 750W PC Power and Cooling Silencer (shown to the right of the Miniplant below). While the PC Power and Cooling unit actually has a lower power rating, the housing is larger due to the layout of the internal components. Other high output units are even larger, which can lead to installation issues in tight quarters.
Installation was no big deal with the Miniplant. The only issues I have encountered when installing a power supply lately is due to the extended length interfering with case fans, optical drives, and other items that were never in the way before power supplies started to grow. The standard size of the Miniplant means it is going to fit in any ATX case!
I had read on the Internet that the Miniplant was extremely quiet, so I actually ran it outside the case at first, just so I could isolate the noise from any other source. Even then it was hard to hear the fan it was so quiet! I had my head so close I was concerned with getting a haircut before I could actually hear the fan. Even under a heavy load the fan remains quiet and the exhaust air remains relatively cool.
Testing:
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) to read from the 20+4 pin motherboard connector. 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, running the SMP version of Folding@Home so both cores were active, running OCCT to stress the CPU and system memory for a span of 30 minutes, and adding a few additional hardware components. The stock settings have the CPU at 3.0GHz (333MHZ x9) and 1.32Vcore, while the memory is running at 1333MHz and 1.6Vmem. The overclocked settings have the CPU at 3.2 GHz (400MHz x8) and 1.35Vcore, while the memory is running at 1600MHz and 1.9Vmem.
» 4x Maxtor Maxline III 250GB SATA hard drives
» Rosewill PCI 4-channel SATA adaptor
» Kingwin 4-bay SATA drive enclosure
» 256MB HIS Radeon HD 2600 PRO PCIe graphics card
In addition to the load condition, something I will refer to as 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.
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