| E-Power Technology Silent Engine Tiger 550W PSU - Page 4 of 5 |
Installation and Performance:
First let me list the specifications of the test system.
• Enermax CS718B case
• Asus A7N8X-E mother board
• AMD XP 2400+ w/ Alpha 8045 HSF
• 1 gig Ultra PC3200 (2x512)
• ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
• Winfast XP200 TV Tuner
• USB 2.0 PCI card
• 40 gig Maxtor ATA133 7200RPM
• 10 gig Maxtor ATA66 7200 RPM
• 16x Samsung DVD player
• 8x NEC DVD burner
• Sunbeamtech 20-in-1 Superior Panel
• Onboard sound
• Onboard LAN
• 2x 120mm case fan
• 1x 80mm case fan
• Waffer PC AirCon PAC 400
|
|
Installing the E-Power Technology Silent Engine Tiger 550 was a snap. Mounting it was the same as any other power supply. Four screws and that is that. Only having to use the cables you need and not having to deal with stuffing the ones you don’t need some place in the case was a real pleasure. The cables that bend to shape and stay where you put them is a big plus. As I discovered, and as was later confirmed by E-Power Technology, both the cooling fan and the lead designated for case fans are controlled by a thermal sensor in the power supply. For testing purposes I hooked two LED case fans to the “case fan” lead and they did work well by raising and lowering the voltage to the fans as the temperature in the case rose and fell. Call me old school, but I am not a big fan of “automatic fan adjustment” and in the end I removed the “case fan” lead and hooked my case fans to the manual fan controller on the Sunbeam 20 in 1 panel we reviewed here back in March of 2005. This was my personal preference and not a reflection on the function of the case fan lead, they performed as they should.
A rating of 550 Watts, along with detachable cables, big cooling fans, sheathed cables, and nice finish on the Silent Engine Tiger 550 are all good things, but what really counts is how well it supplies power to the different voltage rails of the computer. Maybe even more important is that the voltage rails remain constant and stable with no spikes or dips in the readings. So let’s take a look and see just how the Silent Engine Tiger 550 handles these demanding tasks.
It should be noted the measurements were taken with a Fluke 77 digital multimeter, and system load was achieved in a variety of ways. I pulled the Waffer PC AirCon PAC 400 system cooler out of storage to further stress the power supply. The PAC 400 is an “Air Conditioning” system that consists of a peltier and two fans. The PAC 400 draws 45 watts of current when in the “Snow” mode, which I used during all testing. Folding@Home runs on this system any time it is powered up. I also played several games such as Far Cry, Unreal Tournament 2004, Call of Duty, copied CDs using Nero 6 so both DVD drives were in use while running Winfast TV software, and ran Sisoft Sandra CPU burn-in-wizard in the background. As an additional load factor I had Ezonic headphones, a Transcend thumb drive, and a SmartDisk card reader all plugged into the USB bus. All three of these items draw their power directly from the USB bus and thus from the power supply rather than an external source.
The next graph shows a comparison between the Silent Engine Tiger 550 and the Enermax 460 Watt power supply it replaced. These readings were taken under a load as well.
As you can see by the above charts the Silent Engine Tiger 550 has all voltage rails well within specifications. What impressed me the most is how stable the voltage rails are with the Silent Engine Tiger 550. I have had this power supply installed for two weeks now and have been checking the voltage rails several times a day during that time. To my surprise they are always the same. No matter the temperature, if the computer is running at an idle or full load, and no matter how many USB devices I power off the USB bus, the voltage rails remain totally stable. This is something that could not be said about this system with the Enermax 460 watt power supply installed.
Another notable difference is that with the vcore set to 1.725V in the BIOS, the Asus Probe software reported a vcore of 1.696V with the Enermax 460 Watt unit . With the Silent Engine Tiger 550 and the same setting in BIOS, Asus probe reports the vcore to be 1.712, much closer to the BIOS setting. The Silent Engine Tiger 550 has definitely proven it is a solid performer.
Please read on to the next page for more... Next
Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 | Page 5 | Home | Forum | Content Index
|
|
|
|
