Power supplies are usually tested in one of two ways: the PSU is either installed into a real computer or put on a special testbed. In the first case the tester has almost no control over the load on the PSU, so the results are usually not very informative and don’t allow making a general statement about the overall quality of a given power supply.

In the second case the tester fully controls the load and can try the PSU in any allowable mode of operation, but many readers think that the latter method produces purely academic results which allow comparing different PSUs between each other, yet do not make it clear how the PSU is going to behave in a real computer.

For this review I decided to combine both methods. That is, I will check the PSU on our testbed and then will connect it to a real computer, measure the power consumption and put appropriate marks on the diagrams I’ll have drawn based on the testbed data.

This way we’ll have a detailed view of the power supply’s characteristics and, on the other hand, we will see how these characteristics meet the demands of modern computer systems.

I want to note that I measure the consumption of each component independently, for different power rails of the PSU, since this is the only way of getting data appropriate for comparison with the numbers obtained on the testbed. If you want to know the total consumption of the whole system case, you should count in the PSU’s efficiency factor (typically about 70-80%) besides the numbers shown in the review.