When testing a power supply such as this, its important to use a high end system with a top of the line processor along with many optical and hard drives. With this in mind I used an overclocked watercooled test rig for this review and worked the PSU hard for many hours under heavy loads.

Pentium 4 Extreme Edition (engineering sample) 3.4ghz slot 775 overclocked to 3,950mhz.
Asetek watercooling Kit.
Asus P5AD2 motherboard.
Adaptec PCI IDE Raid card.
OCZ 4200 Platinium Rev 2 memory (4 x 1 gigabyte).
2 x Raptor 10,000rpm Hard drives in Raid 0
2 x Western Digital Sata 7,200 120 gig SE Hard drives
2 x Maxtor 300 gig Sata 7,200 300 gig 16 meg cache drives
2 x NEC DVD dual layer burners
2 x 120mm YSTECH Case fans
Asus AX800XT PE PCIe video card, overclocked to 550 core 600 memory
1 x 120 mm YSTECH fan on Zalman Swinging Arm - cooling chipset.
Cold Cathode lighting system
2x Dell 2001fp 20 inch TFT monitors

 

Torture test 1 (synthetic gaming):
Prime 95 running in the background.
3dmark05 running in a continual loop.

 

Torture test 2 (graphics torture):
Prime 95 running in the background.
200 meg Adobe Photoshop file running various tasks in a looped script (monitor 1).
Vue D'Esprit 4 rendering a 2,500,000 polygon scene (looped) (monitor 2).

 

Torture test 3 (video editing):
Prime 95 running in the background.
Imtoo DVD ripper, ripping and encoding a 3 hour long DVD to DIVX format (monitor 1).
Virtual Dub converting a 5 gigabyte video file from VOB to XVID (monitor 2).

 

Torture test 4 (real world gaming):
Farcry (1.3 patch), running a benchmark loop at 1600x1200 4aa 16af.

 

 

Next: Conclusion