| Tuniq Ensemble 1200W Power Supply
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Testing:
Testing of the Tuniq Ensemble 1200W power supply's performance was conducted using 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
» 2x 750GB Seagate Barracuda SATA 3Gbps drives
» 4x 250GB Maxtor MaxLine III SATA 3Gbps drives
» 1x 1024MB Sapphire HD3870 X2 PCI Express graphics card
» 1x SATA DVDRW
» 1x Rosewill PCI 4-port SATA adaptor
» 5x MassCool 80mm case fans
» Windows XP Professional (current)
While that is rather power hungry in itself, I wanted to add even more load to the power supply, and connected the video cards from another system to the Ensemble as well. The other system features an ASUS P5E64WS Evolution X48 motherboard with four PCI Express X16 slots, and three of them were filled with some heavy hitting cards. While the balance of this system's components were handled by a separate PSU, the following video cards were connected to the Tuniq Ensemble:
» 1x 512MB Sapphire HD3870 Toxic PCI Express graphics card
» 1x 512MB ASUS HD3870 TOP PCI Express graphics card
» 1x 1024MB Sapphire HD3850 PCI Express graphics card
The two HD3870 cards in the second system were configured in CrossFire, and this whole setup took a bit of strategy to get the connections made using a variety of adapters.
While all of the components listed were used during idle testing, load testing saw a Seasonic brand "Loader" connected as well. This device can generate up to 148W on the 5V and 12V rails, and it is about as much as I can throw at a PSU right now. And not to spoil the excitement, but it still won't max out a power supply like this!
For comparison purposes, the 1200W Tuniq Ensemble was tested head-to-head with the only other 1kW+ unit I have ever reviewed; the 1250W Cooler Master Real Power Pro. While several other units in this general range have been tested on Bigbruin.com, I have stayed away from them as I realize that outside of using high end, synthetic testing equipment, there is no good way for me to get one of these things fully loaded.
The equipment used during testing included a Radio Shack digital multimeter (Cat. No. 22-810) and a Seasonic Power Angel power monitor.
For idle condition testing, the system was loaded with the hardware listed above except for the Seasonic Loader. It was allowed to sit at the Windows desktop with no applications running for a period of at least 30 minutes. For the load conditions, the Seasonic Loader was connected, Folding@Home was set to run with one instance for each of the four CPU cores, 3DMark06 was run on both systems, and SyncBack was used to transfer data from one drive to two others simultaneously. The Seasonic Loader is not intended to be left connected for too long, so the entire load portion of the test was fifteen minutes long.
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